The odious Gregory Trask is plotting to murder his fabulously wealthy wife, the former Judith Collins, before she can change her will. He has made an arrangement with Aristide, a sadist who is fleeing a demon his former master conjured up from the depths of Hell to stalk him. He promises to lay the demon to rest once Aristide has murdered Judith.
For her part, Judith has made an arrangement of her own with a man named Tim Shaw. Tim is not appreciably more scrupulous than Aristide, and he hates Trask with a passion. He is also free of the time constraints that the stalking demon imposes on Aristide.
Judith goes upstairs to her bedroom, where Aristide is lurking behind the curtains. The scene looks rather like that in the 1954 film Dial M for Murder, in which a man hides behind curtains while waiting to murder a woman whose husband is blackmailing him into the crime. It is likely that Dial M for Murder was on the minds of the makers of Dark Shadows at this time, since star Jonathan Frid had just missed four and a half weeks while playing the lead in a stage production of it in the Chicago area.
In Dial M for Murder, the wife survives the attempt, killing the would-be assassin. Judith also survives, but not through her own action. Instead, the demon, whose name is Garth Blackwood, bursts into the room. Aristide escapes through the window. Trask enters and finds Blackwood still in the room. Blackwood menaces him with a heavy chain he carries, then leaves in pursuit of Aristide.
Judith persuades Trask to join her in a glass of brandy. He takes a sip, she does not. He passes out, and Tim enters. When Trask awakens, he finds himself in a room in the west wing of the house. Tim is with him in the room. Tim tells Trask goodbye, then springs out the door and locks it behind him. When Trask opens the door shortly after, he finds that Tim and Judith are bricking him in.
It’s rather much to ask us to believe that the mortar dries instantly, leaving Trask unable to push the wall down. To be bricked up in Collinwood is the fate of all Trasks- Gregory’s ancestor, the original Reverend Trask, was bricked up in an alcove in the basement of the Old House on the estate in #442 by the vengeful Barnabas Collins. Barnabas chained that Trask up, giving the mortar time to set. Moreover, Barnabas chose a dark little out-of-the-way spot in a vacant house. This is in a bedroom suite that Judith’s brother Quentin uses. Most of Quentin’s stuff is out of the room, but there is still some furniture in there and a bunch of candles. You have to wonder what she will tell Quentin when he comes home. For some time they’ve been going on about how vast the great house is, at one point saying that no one had ever counted the number of rooms in it, so it is just bizarre that Judith picked a room that someone is on his way to sleep in.
This is the first episode credited to Peter Miner as line producer. Dark Shadows was being taped way out of sequence at this period, so Robert Costello’s name will appear in the credits several more times in the next few weeks. The role of the line producers is one of the most under-discussed aspects of the show’s history; writer Ron Sproat, for example, was in a 1985 festival appearance unable to remember ever receiving any input from Costello. So far as he could recall, the writers interacted exclusively with executive producer Dan Curtis.
Robert CostelloPeter Miner
Even if Sproat’s memory were accurate, I suspect that much of Curtis’ own time working on the show was spent in meetings with Costello. He was there from the beginning, and was around throughout the long periods when Curtis was away in London and other places working on other projects. When the show makes deep cuts into its early stages of development, referring to story points that played out long before any of the current staff of writers came aboard, I always suspect it was Costello who suggested the idea. Now that he is leaving, we will see if those references become rarer. If they don’t, maybe it is Curtis’ own memory that has been at work. On the other hand, even if they do dry up it may just be that they had run out of things to say about those old themes. Whatever happens, Costello had a hard job and clearly did it better than almost anyone else could have, it’s sad to see him go.
Today’s story is about the results of a spell that 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi cast a few weeks ago. Petofi forcibly swapped bodies with handsome young Quentin Collins. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.
Yesterday, maidservant Beth Chavez found out about the body swap. In love with Quentin and terrified of Petofi, she was horrified by it. Today, she searches desperately for someone she can trust, and makes the singularly unfortunate choice of weak-willed schoolteacher turned unscrupulous adventurer Tim Shaw. She goes to Tim’s hotel room, tells him the story, and asks for help. Uncharacteristically, he does not look for a way to sell the information Beth gives him. He simply goes to Q-Petofi, whom he believes to be Quentin, in what can only be a sincere effort to do the right thing. He brings Q-Petofi back to his room, where Beth is waiting. She soon manages to escape, and Q-Petofi chases her.
For his part, P-Quentin made a happy discovery yesterday and the day before. When Petofi executed the body swap, he took his powers with him into Quentin’s form. But now P-Quentin finds that the powers have returned to Petofi’s own rightful body, which is to say to him. After consulting with his friend and distant cousin, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, P-Quentin decides to will himself back into his own body.
This works. Quentin awakes as himself, in the woods on Widows’ Hill. He finds Beth at the summit of the hill, near the cliff from which so many people have leapt or fallen to their deaths. She thinks he is Petofi, and flees to the edge while he tries to reassure her of his true identity. The closing cliffhanger leaves her inches from death.
A few years ago, I posted a fanfic idea in the comments on Danny Horn’s post about this episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day. I still like it:
This is one of the episodes that could have been novelized by “Marilyn” Ross under the title “Barnabas, Quentin, and the Dumbest Possible Plan.” Rather than will himself into his own body right away, thus returning Petofi to his body and for all they know to his full powers, a character with brains might have tried swapping places with someone relatively harmless. Beth would seem to be the obvious person. If she comes to in Petofi’s body, Beth would seem to be the person most likely to accept the situation and least likely to use the powers of Petofi to destroy Our Heroes. Playing Quentin may have been just the challenge Terry Crawford really needed to show off her acting talents, and I’m sure Thayer David would have done wonders as Beth.
Quentin/ Beth/ Petofi could have been the first in a whole series of body swaps. Some of those swaps could have led to villains getting their comeuppance, helping to clear the decks for the end of the 1897 segment. So, while inhabiting the body of a villain, Quentin tries to do something heroic, winds up in mortal peril, and at the last second snaps back to his previous host, just in time for the villain to be the one who dies.
Comment posted 6 December 2020 on Danny Horn, “Episode 875: Switchback,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 8 June 2016.
Fans if the original Star Trek will recognize the source of my inspiration. The episode titled “Return to Tomorrow” features a malevolent alien squatting in Mr Spock’s body. Spock hides his consciousness in the brain of Nurse Christine Chapel, whom the alien once controlled, as Petofi once controlled Beth, and who has a crush on Spock as Beth does on Quentin. And Spock and Nurse Chapel, as a composite being, deliver the fatal blow that kills the alien.
Rakish libertine Quentin Collins races to the train station to meet his fiancée, the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris. He thinks he sees her, but it is actually another young woman wearing a remarkably similar outfit. She tells him the train to New York City left a few minutes ago; Quentin knows Amanda was on it, and that she thinks his absence means that their relationship is over. The young woman was quite miffed when Quentin first approached her, but by the time he offers his second apology her look has gone from indignant to concerned to yearning. The guy’s got game, you have to grant him that.
It’s been less than a minute since he made a bad first impression on her, and she’s ready to run off with him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Quentin was detained by a fistfight with a repulsive little man called Charles Delaware Tate. Tate is an artist whose works sometimes have magical powers. His portrait of Quentin, for example, keeps Quentin from turning into a werewolf and ensures him against physical harm. Since Tate is obsessed with Amanda, he stole the portrait from Quentin when he learned Amanda was planning to leave with him. Quentin dared not leave without it, and went to Tate’s studio to demand its return. He very satisfyingly beat Tate senseless, but he did not find the portrait, and now he fears he has lost Amanda forever.
We cut to Tate’s studio. Tate is lying on the floor where he fell when Quentin finished hitting him. Unfortunately, he gets up. Sorcerer Count Petofi, who granted Tate the power to make magical artworks some years ago, enters. He tells Tate that it was stupid to steal Quentin’s portrait. Tate pretends not to know what Petofi is talking about, irritating him and us. Petofi says that he will have to be punished. After he forces Tate to draw a sketch of a pretty woman, he squeezes his wrists, helps himself to Quentin’s portrait, and says what sounds very much like a final goodbye. He exits, and Tate sits down with his pad and pencil. He discovers that he is no longer able to draw, not even a straight line.
These days, Dark Shadows is a costume drama set in 1897. Most of the time between 1966 and 1968, it took place in a contemporary setting. In those days, the set now used as Tate’s studio was the Evans cottage, home to artist Sam Evans, a drunken sad sack, and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. In December of 1966 and January of 1967, the ghost of the gracious Josette compelled Sam to paint alarming images of Laura Murdoch Collins.
It turned out Josette was doing this because she knew the characters were not all that bright and she had to literally paint them a picture to explain that Laura was an undead fire witch bent on incinerating her young son David. Laura tried to thwart Josette’s plan by harming Sam. In #146, Laura caused a fire at the Evans cottage that burned Sam’s hands, temporarily depriving him of the ability to paint. Petofi’s disabling of Tate on the same set will bring this incident back to longtime viewers. Especially so, since Josette is in the air at this point in the show. In #844, a character named Kitty joined the cast. She keeps having mental flashbacks to things only Josette would remember, and Josette’s music box appeared on Kitty’s table at a time when Josette’s ghost seemed to be the likeliest agency to have put it there. Perhaps she will insert herself into Tate’s story for some reason.
When we were watching the scene between Tate and Petofi, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that she very much wished someone else were playing Tate. Violet Welles’ script gives whoever is playing Tate a lot of opportunity to show what he can do in that scene. Roger Davis is a highly trained actor who has a long list of stage and screen credits, but he is almost always very unpleasant to watch on Dark Shadows, and he wastes the potentially fascinating dialogue Welles gave him. When Mr Davis is particularly trying, I usually try to make the scenes bearable by imagining what Frederic Forrest, who was a featured background player in #137, would have done in his place. But the echo of the story about Sam makes me wonder what David Ford would have done as Tate. Ford was in his forties, smallish and pudgy, so a David Ford Tate could not believably have had a fistfight with a character played by the very tall and fit 28 year old David Selby. But he might have been a subtle enough villain that such an exchange would not have been called for. Moreover, the incestuous undertone of Tate’s desire for Amanda, who is the product of one of his magical paintings and therefore a kind of daughter to him, would have been all the more disturbing had Tate been played by the man we knew as Maggie’s father in the 1960s and, when the show was set in the 1790s, as Josette’s.
Back home at the great house of Collinwood, Quentin receives a visit from Tim Shaw, Amanda’s ex and a would-be sleazy operator. He demands Tim tell him what he knows about Amanda’s life in New York before they came to Collinwood. Tim declares he will tell him nothing, to which Quentin responds by choking him and flinging him to the floor. Tim then burbles out everything he knows, which turns out to be nothing of the slightest use. Quentin picks Tim up and throws him out the front door in the most humiliating possible way. We cheer this on almost as joyously as we cheered Quentin’s beating of Tate Friday, but for the opposite reason. Mr Davis is a genuinely disagreeable person who ruins episode after episode, and it was him we were angry with. We chanted at the screen, not “Quen-tin! Quen-tin! Quen-tin!,” but “Da-vid! Da-vid! Da-vid!” hoping Mr Selby would pay him back for all his on-screen assaults on the women and children in the cast. But Don Briscoe was as nice a guy as Tim has become despicable, and he and Mr Selby enjoyed working together. You can see Briscoe’s joy in performance in the way he holds on to a little yellow piece of paper representing a note from Amanda all through the beating Quentin administers. Even the shot of Quentin shoving Tim out with his buttocks prominent is the product of Briscoe’s enthusiastic use of his body to demonstrate Tim’s total defeat.
Quentin’s other fiancée, wicked witch Angelique, comes downstairs to ask what the ruckus was about. Quentin makes up a transparent lie about having a financial interest in some firm in Boston, and says that he and Tim were quarreling about the details of it. Angelique lets him go on with this for a while and to say that he is leaving for Boston, then insists that they set a date for their wedding. He begs off, claiming not to know how long he will be away.
Petofi enters, and tells Angelique about Quentin’s plan to go to New York and look for Amanda. He also tells her that they now have a common cause, and proposes an alliance. Each of them is so powerful, and so evil, that this is a sobering prospect.
When Quentin returns to the foyer, it is his turn to be alone with Petofi. Quentin knows that Petofi gave Tate both the power to create the portrait that freed him of his curse and the commission to do so, and that he is therefore beholden to Petofi for his continued humanity. Part of his motivation for fleeing to New York with Amanda was his hope that he could escape the slavery Petofi has imposed on him as the price of that benefice. When Petofi tells Quentin he has come to see him before he goes, Quentin is momentarily stunned, and then makes a brave little noise to the effect that Petofi can’t stop him. Petofi assures him that he does not want to stop him. It doesn’t matter in the least to him where Quentin is- he can control him from anywhere.
Petofi calls on Tim at his room in the inn. He deepens Tim’s misery by pretending he doesn’t believe what Tim told him about Tate’s magical powers. As he leaves, he takes a brooch that belonged to Amanda.
Quentin is at the train station. Angelique appears there, and tells him not to go. He says that he doesn’t care if she kills him. It will be consolation enough to have died walking away from her. She says that she will not harm him in any way. This causes him to open his eyes wide in terror as it dawns on him what she means. She produces Amanda’s brooch and a doll. She positions the pin of the brooch over the doll’s chest and says that no matter where Amanda is, she will die a horrible death when the pin impales the doll.
Closing Miscellany
The actress who plays the young woman Quentin meets at the train station is billed in the credits as “Amy Yaekerson,” the only person known to Google ever to be called “Yaekerson” and known only for this appearance. But in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, a commenter known as “miles” pointed out that there are lots of people named “Yakerson.” He went on to identify an Amy Yakerson born in New York City on 1 April 1946, and to find a 1966 notice of a play featuring an actress of that name and probably of that age in the New York Daily News. I followed that up with some Googling of my own; the only Amy Yakerson I can find who is online today was born in Connecticut in 1954, so I don’t know where Amy Yakerson, star of stage and screen, is now.
We saw some of Sam’s paintings in Tate’s studio Friday and today, twenty-some years before Sam was born. Tate hides the portrait of Quentin behind one of Sam’s seascapes, and Sam’s portrait of Maggie’s mother is on the floor next to him when we see him lying there in the aftermath of the fight. John and Christine Scoleri have the details in their post about Friday’s episode at Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The year is 1897, and the mythological world described by the ancient Greeks seems very far away. The story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who loved a statue he had made depicting an imaginary woman so intensely that it came to life, answered to the name “Galatea,” and returned his affections, is no exception to that feeling of distance. But here is the lovely Amanda Harris, who used to wonder why she had total amnesia, but now knows that the reason she cannot remember anything prior to two years ago is that she didn’t exist before then. She popped into being when a painter named Charles Delaware Tate made a portrait of his ideal woman.
Tate told her about this and told her that he loved her, but Amanda, unlike Galatea, has no desire for her creator. Perhaps this is because his personality is absolutely intolerable, a common attribute of characters played by Roger Davis. Nor is she interested in Tim Shaw, who brought her to Collinsport to take part in a scam he wanted to run on his old enemies and abandoned her in Tate’s house once he learned of Tate’s powers and thought he saw a way to make more money than his original plan was likely to yield. Instead, she is in love with rakish libertine Quentin Collins. Quentin has asked Amanda to run away with him and get married, and she agrees.
Quentin is trying to control Amanda too, but at least he isn’t a total jerk about it like those other two guys. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Tim and Tate take turns intruding into Amanda’s room and telling her ugly things. Tate snarls at her that she belongs to him because he created her. This claim of ownership would be nasty however it was made, but Mr Davis’ gratingly unpleasant voice makes it truly nauseating to hear. Tim tells her that she isn’t really human, because if she is like another person Tate created she might die if someone shoots her. By that standard humans are extremely rare, but Tim goes on to explain that the man Tate created and then gunned down in cold blood while Tim watched vanished into thin air as soon as he died. So what he means is that Amanda will never be a corpse. In the context of Dark Shadows, a show that is so largely about the reanimation of the dead, this actually makes sense.
Quentin was cursed to be a werewolf, but was freed of the effects of that curse when Tate painted his portrait. When the Moon is full nowadays, the portrait changes, while Quentin himself stays the same. To extort Quentin into leaving Amanda to him, Tate steals the portrait. He tells himself that, if need be, he will destroy the portrait. If Quentin and Amanda stick with their plan of running as far away as possible very soon, they will know nothing about what Tate has done until the night of the next full Moon, when Quentin will turn into the werewolf, kill Amanda, and wake up covered in her blood. I suppose that would meet Tate’s objective of punishing Quentin, but it doesn’t fit very well with his professed belief that he loves Amanda.
Julia Hoffman, MD, has followed her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, on an uncertain and frightening journey into the past. They are now in the year 1897, where Barnabas hopes to prevent disasters that would befall the Collins family in 1969. Today, Julia is in their hiding place, the old rectory on Pine Road, trying to replicate the experimental treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into remission for a while early in 1968. A knock comes at the door.
It is Julia and Barnabas’ current arch-nemesis, sorcerer Count Petofi. Julia reacts to the sight of him with fear. Petofi assures Julia that he does not now have any intention of making another attempt on her life. He tells her that she is alive thanks to the incompetence of his henchman Aristide and to Barnabas’ bravery, but that if she finds herself in danger again she must not count on Barnabas to save her. When he tells her that this is because a woman drove a stake through Barnabas’ heart, Julia reacts with shock. She asks if Petofi plans to hand her back over to Aristide for another try; he says that his plan is rather to keep her under constant surveillance so that when she returns to 1969, he will go along with her.
Julia learns that Barnabas is dead, and not just because it is daytime. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Julia’s displays of fear and bravery are a bit of an attention-getter for returning viewers. Last week she learned that it is only her “astral body” that is in 1897, while her physical body is in 1969. She is therefore immune to any physical harm. It is tactically sound to keep this information from Petofi, of course, but characters on Dark Shadows do not always have sufficient discretion to observe this basic rule of gamesmanship. Barnabas particularly is in the habit of showing all his cards to his enemies while hiding everything from those who would like to help him, and even Julia, who is the smartest character on the show, has done the same thing from time to time. The most celebrated example is probably #619, when she marched into a hostile warlock’s living room, told him everything he wanted to know, and somehow walked away the winner. But today not only does she keep shtum during the scene, the show doesn’t even let the audience in on what she’s doing. First time viewers are as much in the dark as Petofi is.
Later, Julia goes to the great house of Collinwood to tell rakish libertine Quentin Collins that Barnabas had asked her to take a message to him in the event that he died. Quentin is in terrible danger from Petofi, and must flee at once. Quentin says that he has already come to that conclusion, and urges her to do the same. Julia tells him that she cannot. Barnabas left several tasks uncompleted that must be attended to for the future of the Collins family to take its necessary shape. She assures Quentin that she is not in as much danger as he is. She says that Petofi thinks she is his ticket to 1969, and that he will not kill her. Again, she does not even hint at her immunity to physical harm.
Earlier in the episode, Petofi had ordered Quentin to keep watch on Julia. When he resisted, Petofi reminded him that if it were not for his intervention, Quentin would be a werewolf and the lovely Amanda Harris, whom Quentin has asked to run off with him, would be lethally mauled the next time she is in his vicinity during a full Moon. Quentin has betrayed Barnabas and Julia on Petofi’s orders before, and we have little doubt that he will do so again.
Barnabas knew that Quentin was under Petofi’s control, and he shared his information with Julia. The other day he told Quentin where his coffin was kept during the day, leading directly to his staking. Longtime viewers may have taken this as another example of Barnabas showing his cards to his enemies. Those watching closely will have noticed an enigmatic look Barnabas gave Quentin as he was leaving the room at the end of that conversation, and will have asked if he was up to something. That Julia holds back the fact that she cannot be killed in 1897 suggests that she knows that whatever she tells Quentin will get back to Petofi. This will prompt us to ask the same question.
Last week, Julia made an agreement with wicked witch Angelique to fight Petofi together. Angelique would not tell her what her plan of action was, but when Julia looked in the mirror and saw, not her own reflection, but Angelique’s, she said that she understood what the plan was and knew that it would work. So if we have been watching regularly, we are likely confident that Julia, Angelique, and Barnabas have a surprise in store for Petofi.
One of Petofi’s vulnerabilities is prominently featured today. As a supervillain, he is committed to the idea of exercising as much control as possible over the world. With that commitment comes a blind spot. He is slow to understand events that take place outside anyone’s control. When he learned that Barnabas and Julia had traveled through time while meditating on I Ching wands, he himself cast such wands, meditated on them, and had a terrifying experience. He was convinced Julia had directed that experience, and it was when she could not tell him how she had done so or how to subject the consequences of meditation to his will that he ordered Aristide to kill her.
Petofi has now learned that Julia was telling the truth when she said that the effects of the meditative state were not within her power. But he is still experimenting with the wands, trying to develop a technique to subdue the power that meditation on them unlocks. He uses a man named Tim Shaw as the subject of his experiment today; Tim has a vision in which a masked man, who turns out to be Quentin, kills Amanda.
Tim had come to Petofi with the news of Barnabas’ death, hoping to collect some kind of reward from him. Petofi was quite cheerful at the news, but uninterested in the details until Tim told him that the killer was a woman he knows by the name Charity Trask. That threw Petofi for a loop, and he went to Quentin.
Petofi had ordered Quentin to stake Barnabas. He congratulated him on manipulating Charity into doing it for him, and was visibly disconcerted when Quentin said it was an accident Charity followed him- he hadn’t even known she was there. Again, Petofi’s overestimation of the efficacy of plans reveals a soft spot. If Angelique, Julia, and Barnabas can strike him there, they have an excellent chance of bringing him down.
Tim Shaw was a poor put-upon fellow when first we met him in #731, an episode set in April 1897. He had spent his childhood among the pupils imprisoned at Worthington Hall, a dungeon masquerading as a school, and when he was of age the headmaster, the evil Gregory Trask, coerced him into staying on as a teacher. In company with another man, Trask contrived to use Tim as an unwitting instrument in his plot to murder his wife Minerva. Trask’s plan to frame Tim for the murder fell apart, and Tim managed to keep his freedom. Not only that- he stole the legendary Hand of Count Petofi and took it to New York City, where within weeks he used its magical powers to make himself very rich. In August, he returned to Collinsport determined to take revenge on Trask.
Shortly after coming back to his hometown, Tim lost the Hand. (Which, to be clear, was an actual human hand severed from a sorcerer named Count Petofi a century before.) The 150 year old Petofi himself reclaimed it, and reattached it to his wrist. The ill-fortune Tim suffered in his youth left him a weak and cowardly man, who betrayed his only friend when Trask was looking for her. But his good fortune when he was in possession of the Hand has corrupted him much more severely. He used to be kind to children and even risked his life to rescue nine year old Nora Collins when Worthington Hall burned down in #736, but in #816 he violently shook Nora when he found that she had let the box containing the Hand out of her sight. In his pursuit of another gimmick that will enable him to continue getting rich, he has developed a number of schemes, the worst of which do not stop at murder.
This morning, Tim is sitting at a table in the Blue Whale, Collinsport’s tavern. The place isn’t open yet, and Tim does not appear to have any connection with it, so it is simply a mystery how he got in and why he wants to be there. The only other person in the room is sitting at the bar. She is a woman who used to be Trask’s daughter Charity, but who has since been transformed into Cockney showgirl and sometime mentalist Pansy Faye, who died in June.
Pansy’s presence makes some kind of sense, as she works at the tavern doing her act. But returning viewers know that she isn’t still there from the night before. After closing, she went back to the great house of Collinwood, where Trask and she live, and talked with the rakish and profoundly drunk Quentin Collins. After dawn, Pansy followed Quentin from the house to a cave. In the cave, she found a mallet and stake Quentin left behind, and next to them the coffin occupied by vampire Barnabas Collins. She drove the stake into Barnabas’ heart. Now she wants a good stiff drink, and she doesn’t care if she has to pour it herself.
Tim stops Pansy’s attempt to pilfer her employer’s stock, and she tells him that she has destroyed Barnabas. Dollar signs flash in his eyes as he calculates what it is worth to the Collins family to know that their single most embarrassing relative is no longer going to be exsanguinating the locals. Pansy does not want to go back to the great house or even to tell the Collinses what happened, and she steadfastly declares she does not want any of their money. But Tim insists.
At the house, stuffy Edward Collins makes it clear he wants nothing to do with Tim and that he regards Pansy as a lunatic. When Tim makes him listen to the story, Edward dismisses it out of hand. But Edward finally agrees to go to the cave with Tim while Pansy stays in the drawing room.
Edward sees that Pansy was telling the truth, and returns to Collinwood in time to see the aftermath of a strange conversation. Pansy meets Edward’s guest, a young American woman named Kitty Soames who is the widow of the Earl of Hampshire. Pansy’s reaction when the dowager countess introduces herself as “Lady Hampshire” is a very characteristic “Well, la-dee-dah!”
Pansy’s delighted smile and relaxed manner suggest that in Kitty she has recognized a kindred spirit. Returning viewers know she’s onto something- we’ve heard Kitty’s interior monologue as she’s screwed up her courage to try to connect with the rich Collinses. We also know that she and her husband were mixed up with Petofi, who is not an individual who often attracts the innocent. And while she is so quick to deny to Edward that her husband’s suicide had anything to do with business reverses that he assumes she is still imposingly rich, later today we will hear the text of a letter in which she tells her mother that if she doesn’t get something going with Edward, she won’t be able to raise enough money to pay the train fare from Maine to Pennsylvania. So Kitty’s presentation of herself is misleading, and she is not so different from the living Pansy, who was what in the parlance of the 1890s might have been called an adventuress.
In her letter to her mother, Kitty mentions that she first came to the earl’s home as the governess. This circumstance reminds us of two other characters played by the same actress. In the parts of Dark Shadows set in 1969, Kathryn Leigh Scott’s Maggie Evans was the governess at Collinwood. And in the first part of the 1897 segment, she took the role of neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond, who held the same job in that year.
Rachel was the friend whom Tim betrayed to Trask, and the contrast between her and Kitty reflects the change in Tim. Rachel and Tim were both well-meaning but helpless before Trask. They stood out in the 1897 segment as almost the only characters who weren’t playing an angle of their own. Rachel died in Tim’s arms, in the same room where he would later find the Hand. As his discovery of the Hand opened the way for Tim to become a schemer, so the death of Rachel allowed Miss Scott to return as a someone who could keep up with the quick-witted and merrily vicious characters who make 1897 such a delight. Moreover, we are in suspense as to what sort of person Kitty will turn out to be. She could end up being as innocent as Miss Scott’s previous roles, she could be as detestable as Tim has become, or she could land anywhere in between.
Pansy has a vision of a music box. She vocalizes its tune, and tells Kitty that if she ever receives one like it she must destroy it at once. If she does not, she will die. Kitty is upset by the whole conversation. Pansy tells Kitty that she ought to listen to her, because she has “powers.” “I guess… I didn’t use to have, but now I do.” Pansy often mentions this point, which harks back to her first appearance. In #771, the living Pansy came to Collinwood as the fiancée of the childlike Carl Collins. She was astounded to find that in the spirit-charged atmosphere of the estate her phony “mentalist” act really did conjure up a voice from the supernal realms. In turn, that echoed #400, when Charity’s ancestor, the fanatical Rev’d Mr Trask, was delighted that an exorcism he was performing seemed actually to work.
When Edward comes back, he assures Kitty that Pansy is mad and that he will “deal with her.” Kitty goes upstairs to her room, where she will later find that the music box Pansy described has materialized. This music box has a long history, and in 1967, when the show was set in contemporary times, Barnabas used it to try to convince girls that they were his lost love Josette. Even if Barnabas hadn’t been staked, we wouldn’t suspect him of planting the music box in Kitty’s room- it appears there during the daytime. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will remember that Josette’s ghost used to be quite active around Collinwood, and might wonder if she did it.
In the drawing room, Edward talks with Tim and Pansy. He refuses to call Pansy anything other than “Charity Trask”; she is indignant at being live-named, but he won’t relent. He asks her to stay in the house, and offers to provide her with the best possible mental health care. She angrily declares “I! Ain’t! Sick!”
Tim says that he will see to it that Pansy doesn’t tell anyone about Barnabas; Edward doesn’t bother to conceal his contempt for Tim, and makes it clear that he will not pay him for this or any other service he might offer to perform. Pansy tells Tim that it is time for them to leave. She invites Edward to catch her act at the Blue Whale; he says he doesn’t expect to find the time, but that he is sure Tim will come back to Collinwood when he wants something.
When Tim first came back to town, he had a girlfriend named Amanda whom he planned to use in the game he was going to run on Trask. Eventually we learned that this plan was to involve the murders of the former Judith Collins, who is now Trask’s wife, and of Trask himself. Amanda would marry Trask after she had incited him to kill Judith, they would then kill Trask, and Tim would marry Amanda, thereby becoming the master of Collinwood. Amanda was never fully sold on the homicides, and she and Tim now seem to have gone their separate ways. So Tim is left without friends and without a plan. Nor does he seem to understand how dangerous the people he is dealing with truly are. He thinks that he can bluff his way into partnership with the enormously powerful and thoroughly evil Petofi, and is only dimly aware of the other monsters lurking in the area. One might surmise that Tim’s happiest days are firmly behind him.
Adventurer Tim Shaw is in his hotel room with an apparently mute man, trying to get him to speak. The man is struggling to make a sound when artist Charles Delaware Tate enters and produces a revolver. Tate proclaims that the man will never speak. He fires, and the man falls dead to the floor.
The man’s body glows, then vanishes. Tim knows that Tate created the man earlier in the evening. Tate has a magical power that enables him to cause objects and people to pop into existence just by drawing them. Tim says that he ought to call the police, since Tate just murdered a man in cold blood in front of him. But there is no body, and the only other person who has seen the man is Tim’s traveling companion and occasional accomplice Amanda Harris, who turns out to be another of Tate’s creations. So instead Tim pours a drink, and Tate tells him all about how he gained his powers as the result of a bargain he struck with sorcerer Count Petofi.
Petofi is aware of several magical abilities he gave Tate, but does not know that he can bring his creations to life. Tim calls Petofi to his room and brings him up to date. He believes that this report will somehow establish a partnership between himself and Petofi. Since Tate made it clear that his powers are the result of Petofi’s own interventions, it is unclear why Tim would expect even a finder’s fee for this information. It certainly does not provide the basis for an ongoing relationship of any kind.
Meanwhile, a visitor is arriving at the great house of Collinwood. Her face is familiar to longtime viewers- she is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who has been in the cast from #1 as Maggie Evans, wisecracking waitress turned The Nicest Girl in Town. When from November 1967 to March 1968 the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s, Miss Scott played the gracious Josette; she had already played Josette’s ghost in some of the episodes in contemporary dress, and in the spring and summer of 1967 vampire Barnabas Collins had tried to brainwash Maggie into becoming Josette. We last saw Miss Scott from March to June in the first part of the still-ongoing segment set in 1897, when she was neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond.
Before we know the name of this new character, we see that she is wearing widow’s weeds. There is also a first- we hear her thoughts in an interior monologue before she interacts with another character. Whoever she is, the widow is telling herself that she has come to her big moment and she shouldn’t chicken out now. “No one will know,” she assures herself.
Neither Maggie, Josette, or Rachel ever used that facial expression.
The unknown widow knocks, and rakish libertine Quentin Collins lets her in. He appreciates her beauty and asks who in the house is fortunate enough to know her. She says that she and her late husband were friends of the stuffy Edward Collins. Quentin says that Edward is away, and identifies himself as his brother. “Quentin or Carl?” asks the widow. Quentin says, with a sad note, that Carl is dead. This is the first time anyone other than his onetime fiancée Pansy Faye has mentioned Carl’s name in the three months since his death.
The widow finally identifies herself as Kitty Soames, Countess to the late Earl of Hampshire. She says that she is an American, and that after her husband’s death she felt that she was a stranger in England and ought to return home. Quentin invites her to stay in the house.
Kitty is alone in the foyer when Petofi enters. She is horrified to see him. It becomes clear that her husband’s death was a suicide, and that Petofi’s threats prompted it. She goes out to take a walk in the woods.
Along the way, she meets Barnabas, who has traveled back in time from 1969. They have a brief talk. When she exits, he says that she is Josette, returned to him at last.
Back in the great house, Quentin finds Kitty looking at the spot on the wall next to the front door where Barnabas’ portrait has long hung. Some weeks ago, Edward learned that Barnabas was a vampire and ordered the portrait removed. There is a mirror there now, the same mirror that hung in that spot in #195, when the ABC art department was painting Barnabas’ portrait and another portrait was reflected in it. Kitty asks Quentin why Barnabas’ portrait was removed. Since she has never been in the house before, this question perplexes him. He asks how she knows about the portrait and how she knows of Barnabas. At first she is amused by the idea that she would not know of him, but a second later she returns to herself. She insists she has never met anyone named Barnabas and has no idea what Quentin is talking about. Perhaps this time, Barnabas is right- maybe Kitty really is a revenant of Josette.
Miss Scott was one of the biggest stars on the show. She tells a story nowadays about a trip she and her then-husband took to Africa in the late 1960s, when they were on a photo safari deep in the bush. Some people happened by, took one look at her, and all started saying excitedly “Maggie Evans!” So it is inexplicable that today’s closing credits misspell her name as “Kathryn Lee Scott.”
This night in 1897, Beth Chavez has lost both her job as a maid in the great house on the estate of Collinwood and her hopes of marrying rakish libertine Quentin Collins. She goes to the lair of sorcerer Count Petofi and volunteers to work for him. Petofi makes it clear that the position Beth is applying for is that of slave. She accepts without hesitation, and he has her do some mumbo-jumbo on his behalf.
This story point would make sense if Beth were a deeply dependent person who couldn’t imagine life without Quentin or her old job. But we’ve known Beth for months and months, and this is the first we’ve heard that she is like that. Terrayne Crawford’s acting ability was limited to embodying one feeling at a time, and in no scene was she assigned to demonstrate “corrosive sense of personal incompleteness.” So we know she is hung up on Quentin and we know she likes her job, but we also know that as one event follows another she responds with the emotion we would expect a level-headed person to have. Even when she got carried away the other day and tried to shoot Quentin, it didn’t seem to be a sign of mental breakdown. After Petofi showed up and stopped her, he pointed out that the way Quentin treats women, it is a marvel that none of them had tried to kill him before. If anything, her attempt on Quentin’s life suggested Beth has enough strength of character to leave Collinsport and make a fresh start.
Tate and the Creatures
For much of 1968, when Dark Shadows was in a contemporary setting, Roger Davis played a man named Peter Bradford who very loudly insisted that everyone call him Jeff Clark. Peter/ Jeff had no memory of his life more than a year or two before the present. Well-meaning governess Vicki knew that Peter/ Jeff had lived in the 1790s, and his shouting about his preferred name often came in response to Vicki’s attempts to tell him what she knew. Peter/ Jeff was convinced that if there were something supernatural about him, he would be incapable of loving anyone or of being loved.
Peter/ Jeff spent most of 1968 entangled with the story of Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Peter/ Jeff had assisted mad scientist Eric Lang in digging up the corpses from which Lang assembled Adam’s body. After Lang’s death, another mad scientist, Julia Hoffman, completed his work, attaching the body of recovering vampire Barnabas Collins to the body to provide the “life force.”
Mad scientists and vampires are two metaphors for extreme selfishness, so it was no surprise that Julia and Barnabas were the worst parents the newborn Adam could possibly have had. Within an hour of Adam’s awakening, Barnabas had loaded a gun and was on his way to kill him. When he relented from that plan, he and Julia took Adam to the prison cell in the basement of Barnabas’ house, where they locked his ankle in a fetter chained to the wall. They kept him within the blank walls of that cell for weeks on end, giving him nothing to play with, nothing to learn from, and nothing soft to touch. Nor did they ever allow him human contact for more than a few minutes at a time. They delegated Adam’s feeding to Barnabas’ servant Willie, who taunted him cruelly. Unsurprisingly, when Adam escaped from the cell he was rough with everyone he met, and when he found someone he liked he abducted her and found a place to lock her up. That was the only form of human interaction the big guy had ever known.
Now, the show is set in 1897, and Mr Davis plays artist Charles Delaware Tate. Tate combines the most disagreeable elements of all the characters involved in the story of Adam. Like Lang and Julia, he has the power to bring people to life without the usual processes of reproduction and growth. In his case, he simply draws or paints someone, and they pop into existence. He did that two years ago, in 1895, with a beautiful young woman he had imagined. He made a sketch and then a painting, and suddenly there she was, walking along a sidewalk in New York City. She took the name Amanda Harris, and has recently made her way to Collinsport.
Tate wasn’t there to see Amanda’s instantiation. But he recognized her when he did see her, and he has since drawn some inanimate objects that he saw come into being. So he figured out what Amanda’s origin must have been, and he has been shouting at her about it for a while. As Peter/ Jeff did not want to believe Vicki when she told him he was not native to the twentieth century, so Amanda does not want to believe Tate when he tells her that she came into being in the way that, in Greek myth, Pygmalion brought the lovely Galatea to life. But yesterday Amanda went to Tate’s studio, and he drew an imaginary man. That man appeared while Amanda watched.
We open today in Tate’s studio. Amanda is gone, and Tate is screaming at the man and declaring that he will kill him. The man is just standing there- he is fully grown, apparently in his mid-twenties, but in reality he is only a few minutes old. He doesn’t seem to be able to talk. He reacts to Tate’s extreme hostility with bafflement.
Tate rips up the drawing, and is disappointed the man does not die. A knock comes at the door. He shoves the man in the closet and locks him in there. Within moments, he reenacts Barnabas’ attempt to shoot Adam and his confinement of Adam to the cell. Tate had not been written as especially evil before this, but now he takes his place among Dark Shadows‘ cruelest villains. We may wonder if the character would have been developed differently had he not been played by the bombastic Mr Davis. Perhaps if the writers had been scripting a role for a more pleasant actor, they could have let Tate be a relatively nice guy.
Tate opens the door. Amanda is there, standing behind her traveling companion and sometime partner-in-crime, adventurer Tim Shaw. Amanda has told Tim what Tate did, and Tim demands to see the man. Tim sees the closet doorknob turning, and insists Tate unlock it. Tate at first denies that he has a key, but Tim pulls a gun and forces him to comply. In his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn has a funny bit about this moment:
Now, if life was like a Tex Avery cartoon, and I think we can all agree that it should be, then Tate’s next move would be to grab his sketchpad and draw an even bigger gun. Then Tim would reach into his pocket and pull out a machine gun, and Tate would draw a rocket launcher, and we could go back and forth like that until somebody pushes down on a plunger detonator, and there’s an explosion that cracks the Earth in two. That would be a good scene.
Danny Horn, “Episode 843: I Can Make You a Man,” posted to Dark Shadows Every Day, 19 March 2016.
As it is, Tate just hands over the key. Tim unlocks the door, finds the man, and loses all interest in Amanda. He tells Tate that he is sure he will take good care of Amanda as he leaves with the man.
Tate shouts at Amanda and grabs various parts of her body, adjusting their position as if she were an action figure. He’s hollering something about love when she pulls away from him and declares that, as an unnatural creature, she can neither love nor be loved. Again, longtime viewers remember Mr Davis as Peter/ Jeff, yelling the same sentiment. But Amanda goes further than Peter/ Jeff ever did with the affable Vicki. She says that can hate, and that she hates him very cordially indeed.
In his hotel room, Tim is trying to coax the man Tate created into speaking. The man tries to make a sound, but fails. Tate himself comes barging in. He has a gun, and points it at the camera. He announces that the man will never speak, because he is going to murder him forthwith.
In the comments section of Danny’s post, I left a long comment which is I suppose a first draft of this post. You can read it there.
In Dark Shadows #1, set in 1966, two people came to Collinsport, Maine. They were the well-meaning Vicki Winters and dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Vicki had taken a job as the governess in the great house of Collinwood, hoping that she would find the answers to questions she had about her own mysterious origins. Those questions had left her feeling that she knew nothing about herself.
Burke was a working class boy from Collinsport who had gone to New York City five years before, fresh out of prison and penniless. By 1966 he was a corporate raider, a millionaire many times over. He came back to his hometown because he wanted revenge on high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, who used Burke’s car to kill someone while Burke was passed out drunk in the backseat, then persuaded the court that Burke was solely responsible for the homicide. Burke and Vicki ultimately became a couple, but for some months Burke strung Roger’s niece Carolyn along and used her to cause trouble for the Collinses.
Now the show is set in 1897, and Burke and Vicki are both long gone. Carolyn and Roger are waiting for us when the show returns to contemporary dress, and the actors who play them are in the cast in other roles. But we’ve been reminded of Burke recently. Tim Shaw is a working class boy from Collinsport who, after spending time as a teacher at a miserable boarding school run by the evil Rev’d Gregory Trask, was chosen by Trask to take the fall for the murder of his wife, Minerva Trask. As Burke was physically present but mentally compromised at the killing for which he went to prison, so Tim was present at the killing of Minerva, but not in his right mind. The show is about the supernatural now, so it was a magic spell, not booze, that kept Tim from knowing what was going on when he poisoned Minerva. And the pace is too fast for arrests and trials, so Trask’s plan went wrong and he had to tell the police Tim wasn’t guilty after all. So Tim went straight to New York, and just a few weeks later came back to Collinsport, very rich and out for revenge.
Like Burke, Tim arrives in Collinsport with a woman. Unlike Vicki, Amanda Harris knew Tim before they got on the train. But we learn today that Amanda, like Vicki, is tormented by her ignorance of her own background. Again, the starker palette in which the show draws its stories at this period means that instead of not knowing who her birth parents were, Amanda has no memories at all prior to two years ago.
Amanda first appeared as a hardboiled operator who was attached, not to Tim, but to his money, and who gave him expert assistance in the con game he was running on Trask. As Tim was an elaboration on Don Briscoe’s W. C. Fields’ imitation, Amanda was a nod to Mae West. But the show has decided to make Amanda a long-term addition to the cast, and they already have an all-villain cast. So they soften Amanda’s edges. We see her packing her bags and telling Tim she is going to leave because he doesn’t really care about her and she can’t stand what she is doing with Trask. When she complains that Tim is just using her, she echoes speeches Carolyn made after her bitter realization about Burke’s true intentions. Now that her relationship to Tim mirrors both Vicki and Carolyn’s relationships to Burke, Amanda can inherit the goodwill longtime viewers have towards both of those characters.
To Have Something I Can Believe In
Tim’s sudden wealth came from his possession of a magical object, The Hand of Count Petofi. When Amanda first heard of the Hand, she asked if it was a piece of jewelry or some other kind of artifact. It did not occur to her that it was literally the severed hand of a Hungarian nobleman. This gruesome thing had been cut a century before, in 1797, by nine Rroma men, and had ever since been in the custody of the leader of their tribe.
In #778, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi returned to her home in the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. She had gone to Boston, where King Johnny Romana, possessor of the Hand, was staying with his caravan. She had pleaded with King Johnny to help her remove a curse she had placed that made rakish libertine Quentin Collins and all his male descendants into werewolves. Magda had not known when she placed the curse that Quentin was the father of her sister Jenny’s children. She hoped that King Johnny would take pity on the Rroma children and use the Hand to end the curse. When he did not, she stole it, intending to use its powers herself. Magda soon found that the Hand did no one’s bidding. It helped some people, hurt others, and was stolen by each of a long series of scheming characters.
After Tim brought the Hand back to Collinsport, it was stolen again. This time, the thief turned out to be none other than Count Petofi himself, 150 years old and on the point of death. Once he had the Hand back, it reattached itself to his wrist and he regained his health.
Petofi has some sort of plans for Quentin. He has retained one of his minions, nationally renowned artist Charles Delaware Tate, to paint a portrait of Quentin. That project is finished, but Tate is still living in a cottage he has rented in Collinsport. Today Petofi visits Tate there.
Petofi finds Tate sketching an imaginary woman, one he has been obsessively drawing and painting for about two years. Petofi sets himself up as Tate’s analyst. “Only little boys invent ideal women,” says he. He has a plan to relieve Tate’s childish fixation. It is another project. If Tate had seen A Chorus Line, he might appreciate Petofi’s theory of work as therapy, as explained in the lyric “Give me a job and you instantly get me involved, if you give me a job then the rest of the crap will get solved.” But that show won’t premiere for another 78 years, so Tate resists.
It doesn’t help that the job Petofi has in mind involves another severed hand. The Rroma are on their way, and they want the Hand back. Petofi, whose magical powers were formidable even when he was one-handed, is much mightier now, but the thought of the Rroma agitates him violently. Evidently they know about some weakness of his that enables them to defeat him. King Johnny and his men don’t know that Petofi is in Collinsport. He has cast a spell to silence Magda, but they won’t leave the area without the Hand. Several people know about Petofi and have no reason to protect him. If the Rroma start asking questions, it won’t be long before they close in. So Petofi has exhumed a recently deceased local man, cut off his right hand, and brought it to Tate for detailing.
Tate owes his talents, and his life, to Petofi, so the outcome of their meeting is never really in doubt. His next encounter does involve a surprise. Amanda comes to Petofi’s hiding place, sent by Tim, and asks for his help. Petofi tells Amanda that Tim has a poor strategic sense. Indeed, Petofi has already told Tim that, lovely as Amanda is, he has no use for her at the present time. But when he sees her face to face, Petofi recognizes her as the imaginary woman in Tate’s pictures.
Returning viewers already know that Tate’s portrait of Quentin takes on the features of a wolf when the Moon is full, so it is no surprise that his works, like several other portraits we have seen on Dark Shadows, have magical powers. When we learn that Tate first painted Amanda two years ago and she has no history prior to that time, we figure out that he inadvertently used those powers to conjure her into being.
Tate is played by Roger Davis, an unpleasant man who figured as Vicki’s love interest in her last, woefully ill-conceived storyline. In that arc, made and set in 1968, Mr Davis’ part was variously known as Peter Bradford and Jeff Clark. He had amnesia, and Vicki kept trying to help him recover memories which would prove to him that he has no roots in the 1960s, but that he is an uncanny being who was brought to life by an adventure she had outside the bounds of space and time. Once we recognize what they are suggesting about Amanda’s origin, longtime viewers might expect an inversion of that story, with Mr Davis playing the person trying to persuade his lover that he accidentally created her by a magical process he himself did not understand.
Somebody to Dance For
While all of this action is taking place downstream of Count Petofi, the person who set in motion the events that first brought Petofi to town is in big trouble. Magda comes home to find King Johnny himself waiting for her. He menaces her, calls her names, and twice hits her in the face very hard.
Ever since Violet Welles joined the writing staff, men have been slapping women quite a bit on Dark Shadows. Welles was by far the best writer of dialogue on the show, but I for one could do without the slapping. Fortunately King Johnny is played by Paul Michael, a well-trained actor; no matter how brutally King Johnny abuses Magda, Grayson Hall is in no danger. One could never say the same of Mr Davis’ screen partners.
King Johnny tells Magda that he will take her back to his caravan in Boston to stand trial for the death of Julianka, a Rroma maiden whom he sent to kill her some weeks ago. Since Magda cannot say Petofi’s name, she cannot tell King Johnny that it was he who killed Julianka. Magda is terrified of the trial, and King Johnny tells her that there is a way she can avoid it. If she does not give him the Hand, he will slit her throat immediately.
King Johnny searches the house, and does not find the Hand. He is about to carry out his promise to kill Magda when he sees the wooden box in which the Hand was long kept lying on the floor. He opens it. What he sees inside resembles the Hand closely enough to convince him, and keep Magda alive for another day. Clever as she has been so far, we may wonder how many days are left for her. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around to throw Magda a rope to grab onto.
From December 1968 to through February 1969, strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy) and his friend Amy Jennings (Denise Nickerson) were falling under the power of the malign ghost of Quentin Collins. Occasionally the children were possessed by the spirits of David’s grandfather Jamison and great-aunt Nora; at other times they were possessed by Quentin’s own spirit and that of Quentin’s sometime lover, maidservant Beth. In those same days, Amy’s brother Chris (Don Briscoe) was suffering from a curse that made him a werewolf.
As Quentin’s power over David and Amy grew, so did the frequency and duration of Chris’ spells in lupine form. By #700, Quentin so dominated the great house on the estate of Collinwood that its residents fled to the Old House on the estate, home of their distant cousin Barnabas Collins. David, entirely possessed by Jamison, was close to death. For his part, Chris was stuck in wolf form, apparently permanently, and Barnabas had locked him in a secret room in the old Collins family mausoleum.
Desperate to remedy the situation, Barnabas and his associate, occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes (Thayer David,) searched Quentin’s old room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house. They found some I Ching wands there. Under Stokes’ direction, Barnabas threw the wands, meditated on them, and found himself transported back in time to 1897. In that year, Quentin, Beth, Jamison, and Nora are alive, and Barnabas is a vampire.
Barnabas had no idea what led Quentin to become a malevolent ghost or what first brought the werewolf curse on Chris, but he had reason to believe that 1897 was an important year in the events leading up to both of those unhappy circumstances. So once he arrived in that period, he spent his nights meddling in all the affairs of the Collins family he found there. Vampires are not problem-solvers; their function in a story is to create problems that other characters will have to solve. So all of Barnabas’ well-intentioned interventions backfired badly. Even disregarding the many murders he committed for his own selfish ends, including the murder of Quentin’s brother Carl Collins, his trip would by any standard have to be considered a disaster.
Now, evil sorcerer Count Petofi (Thayer David) has found that Barnabas is a visitor from the future and is determined to go with him when he returns to 1969. When he demanded Barnabas tell him his secret, Barnabas quite truthfully told him he had no idea what was going on when he found himself transported from one period to another. Petofi did not believe him, and is trying to extort the information he wants by summoning the spirit of David to come from 1969 and possess Jamison (David Henesy) in 1897.
Not only is this an intriguing reversal of the 1968-1969 story in which the ghost of Quentin caused Jamison’s spirit to possess David, it also picks up on some recent hints that they might retcon the whole “Haunting of Collinwood” story to put Quentin’s ghost under the control of Petofi. Even if he can’t hitch a ride with Barnabas, perhaps Petofi will find a way to use Quentin to go back to 1969 with us.
Nora (Denise Nickerson) is with her brother Jamison when the possession takes hold. She is puzzled that he insists on calling her “Amy” and himself “David” and that he tells her to call Quentin on the telephone, even though he is in the house. When Quentin shows up, he recognizes the name David Collins from something Barnabas has told him about the future. But Barnabas has not told Quentin that he is fated to become a family-annihilating ghost, and so Quentin cannot understand how David knows who he is.
Meanwhile, a man named Tim Shaw (Don Briscoe) comes to the house and visits Nora in her room. Tim is Amy’s former teacher, and she considers him a friend. She does not know that since she first knew him, he has lost his moral compass, found the severed Hand of Count Petofi, stolen it, and used its magical powers to make a small fortune in New York City. Evidently all working-class Collinsport boys get rich quick when they go to NYC. In 1961, ex-fisherman Burke Devlin got out of prison and went to that city. By the time he returned to Collinsport in 1966, Burke was a big-time corporate raider who had to think for a moment when David Collins asked him if he’d already made his first $100,000,000. He answered “Not yet.” If he’d had the Hand, no doubt he would have passed that milestone long before.
A couple of days ago, Tim asked Nora to hide a box for him. Unknown to her, the box contained the Hand. Tim asks Nora to return the box to him. She tells him Jamison has it, and he flies into a rage. He gets very rough with her. Briscoe and Nickerson were both good actors, and we’ve seen them share tender moments both as Nora and Tim and as Amy and Chris, so the resulting scene is as uncomfortable as it needs to be to show us that Tim is no longer the long-suffering nice guy we once knew. Moreover, longtime viewers who recognize Tim’s echo of Burke and remember that Burke, though sometimes villainous, was always good with David, will be shocked that Tim does not mirror the earlier character’s consistent soft spot for children.
Tim goes downstairs and sees Quentin coming out of the drawing room. He demands to see Jamison. Quentin tells him that Jamison is ill, and it will be impossible for anyone to talk to him. Tim starts to get ugly about it, and Quentin cuts him off, saying that Jamison doesn’t have the Hand. Tim is shocked that Quentin knows about the Hand, but recovers sufficiently to ask who does. Quentin cheerfully tells Tim that if he goes to the abandoned mill at the end of the North Road, he will find his onetime acquaintance Aristide, and that Aristide will direct him to the man who has the Hand.
Tim knows Aristide only slightly, but he has a grudge against him. Aristide attacked Tim’s girlfriend Amanda and demanded she tell him where the Hand was. Even after he realized Amanda did not know what he was talking about, he beat her and threatened to kill her, forcing her to tell him whatever she did know that would help him retrace Tim’s steps. When Tim found Amanda, Aristide had left her unconscious, and Tim feared at first she might be dead.
We cut to the hideout in the mill, where Tim is waiting with a pistol and thinking that he would be justified in killing Aristide for what he did to Amanda. When Aristide comes, Tim holds him at gunpoint and demands the Hand be returned to him. Aristide tells him that is not possible. They quarrel until another man enters. It is Petofi, who shows Tim that the Hand has resumed its place at the end of his right arm.
That suffices to show Tim that the Hand is no longer available to him. Petofi tells him he should consider himself lucky that the Hand, which followed no one’s commands, chose to make him rich and happy. Tim says he is not happy, and will not be until he can take revenge on the hypocritical Rev’d Gregory Trask and lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley. This again reminds longtime viewers of Burke, whose original goal in returning to Collinsport was to wreak vengeance on Roger Collins. As Trask and Evan involved Tim in a homicide when he was not in his right mind and tried to make him alone pay the legal penalty for it, so Roger killed someone with Burke’s car while Burke was passed out drunk in the back seat and saw to it that the court concluded that Burke was driving.
Petofi laughs and congratulates Tim on his choice of enemies. Tim brightens and asks if Petofi will join with him in bringing Trask and Evan down. Petofi explains that he does nothing without a price. Tim says he has a lot of money, and Petofi says he doesn’t have any use for money. Petofi brings up Amanda, only to say that he doesn’t have a use for her either, at least not at the moment. He sends Tim along his way.
Aristide is talking when Petofi dismisses him. He tells him that two visitors are coming, and that he wants to be alone when they arrive. He will not explain further, and so Aristide is in rather a huff when he leaves.
The visitors are Quentin and Jamison/ David. Quentin is carrying his nephew/ great-great-nephew. He demands that Petofi cure Jamison of the possession, which seems to be killing him. Petofi refuses. When Jamison/ David calls Quentin by name, Petofi asks him how a boy who lives in 1969 knows who he is. Quentin’s bewildered reaction leaves us wondering how he will respond if Barnabas ever tells him just why he went to the past.
In the opening teaser, Petofi stood over the coffin in which he has trapped Barnabas. He told Aristide that he and Barnabas have been at war for what even he, at his immense age, considers to be a very long time. He says that they are now engaged in the final battle of that war.
Petofi’s remarks make absolutely no sense whatever in the context of what we have seen. It has been clear so far that Petofi’s presence at Collinwood is an accident, that Barnabas never heard of him before, and that Petofi only just learned that Barnabas has traveled through time. Many of the oddest dead ends on the show were left over from advance plans that hadn’t worked out; so when they were drawing up broad outlines six months before taping, or when they were writing episode summaries (called “flimsies”) thirteen weeks before, they would often include ideas that depended on story points that they never got around to making happen or characters who never worked out. Once in a while, the writers tasked with filling in the flimsies wouldn’t be able to make up a complete 22 minute script without incorporating some of this irrelevant material. So perhaps at some point in the planning process they meant to have stories about Barnabas going back to the eighteenth century and fighting Petofi there. They may still have been kicking that idea around when they shot this installment.
If Dark Shadows has offended, Think but this, and all is mended — That you have but slumbered here While these visions did appear. And now, a word from All Temperature Cheer.
Danny Horn, “Episode 816: Midsummer,” posted 1 February 2016 at Dark Shadows Every Day.
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