tim shaw – Page 2 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 813: All things, good or evil, come to the same end

This is the first episode to feature a scene in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn since #227 in May 1967. The show was in black and white then; apparently the restaurant set cannot be seen in color, since this one, set in the year 1897, survives only in kinescope.

Aristide, Tim, and Jamison/ Petofi in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Schoolteacher turned adventurer Tim Shaw is at a table in the restaurant when he is joined by twelve year old Jamison Collins, a former student of his. Unknown to Tim, Jamison’s body is currently a vessel for the spirit of 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi. Tim is startled to see Jamison, and tells him he had heard he was ill. Jamison asks where he heard this. Tim pauses, then claims that he telephoned Jamison’s home, the great house of Collinwood. He says that Jamison’s nine year old sister Nora answered the phone and told him of his illness. Tim tells Jamison that he is waiting for a young lady, and that after she arrives he would like to be alone with her.

A man enters and talks with Tim. After he goes, Jamison asks who he is. Tim says he has only met him once, and that he knows almost nothing about him beyond the fact that his name is Aristide. We have seen Aristide in the woods with Jamison/ Petofi, and know that he is Petofi’s servant. Jamison/ Petofi told him in that scene that he felt weak and had only a few hours left if he did not recover “The Hand.”

We also saw Aristide in Tim’s room with Amanda, the young lady Tim is waiting to meet. He confronted Amanda, roughed her up, and threatened her with a prop representing a dagger with a curved blade. He wanted Amanda to tell him where “The Hand of Count Petofi” is. Amanda asked if “The Hand of Count Petofi” was a piece of jewelry or something. She had no idea it is literally a severed hand, cut from the wrist of Count Petofi 100 years ago. Aristide questioned her and learned that Tim took a box from the Inn earlier that night and returned without it.

Tim excuses himself, saying that he will go to the front desk to ask if Amanda left a message there explaining why she is so late. Jamison/ Petofi meets Aristide back in the woods. When Aristide tells him that Tim took a box from the Inn and returned without it, he remembers that Tim said he had talked on the telephone with Nora. He deduces that Tim actually talked to Nora in person when he took the box to Collinwood and enlisted Nora’s help hiding it there.

Jamison/ Petofi goes to Nora’s room and wakes her. He tricks her into telling him that Tim was there, but she refuses to tell him where the box is. He twists her arm until she does so. In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, David Henesy played strange and troubled boy David Collins, and Denise Nickerson played nine year old Amy Jennings. David and Amy were intermittently possessed by Jamison and Nora in late 1968 and early 1969, and when Amy/ Nora resisted David/ Jamison in #667 and #679, he twisted her arm. When we see the same violent act here, we see a dramatization of a cycle of abuse. We may also wonder if they are going to retcon that “Haunting of Collinwood” segment to include Petofi as a driving force.

Jamison/ Petofi takes the box from Nora’s armoire, opens it, and holds up the Hand. Regular viewers can expect Petofi to return to his own physical form, reattach the Hand to his wrist, and increase his magical powers greatly.

All of the male cast members have trouble with their dialogue today, even the usually line-perfect David Henesy. I wonder if writer Gordon Russell was late finishing the script. Mr Henesy and Michael Stroka manage to give good enough performances that their bobbles don’t really matter, but Don Briscoe is just bad today. When Tim is talking with Nora in the teaser, his intonations are bizarre, and in his later scenes he is flat and lifeless, including a long stretch when he is openly reading off the teleprompter. Perhaps that’s because of his acting style- he worked from the inside out, finding his character’s motivations and developing those first, adding the dialogue last. Give an actor like that less time than he needs, and he might not have anything at all to offer.

One unfair criticism that Briscoe gets from many of the fans who post comments online is that Tim does not have romantic chemistry with any of the women he is paired with. He isn’t supposed to have romantic chemistry with them! At first we see him linked with neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond. Tim and Rachel were students together at the boarding school run by the sadistic Gregory Trask. When Jamison and Nora are sent to the same school, Tim and Rachel illustrate the horror that lies in store for them. If Tim and Rachel were a hot and exciting couple, they would send the message that kids subjected to Trask’s abuse can grow up to be happy adults, muffing the whole point of the story.

The second woman attached to Tim was Trask’s daughter Charity. Nora points out to Jamison today that Tim and Charity never got along with each other, and regular viewers remember that this is true. Trask forced them to get engaged, a situation that made them both miserable, and then led them both to believe that Tim had murdered Charity’s mother. Again, the whole point of the relationship is to demonstrate how cruel Trask is.

Now Tim is traveling with Amanda. We met Amanda yesterday, and saw that she is impatient with Tim and tolerates him only because he has a lot of money and keeps spending it on her. As possessor of the Hand of Count Petofi, Tim has managed to get rich quick and turn into a tragic version of the character W. C. Fields played in vaudeville routines and stage plays and films set in the Gay Nineties. Amanda is the sort of woman Fields’ characters invariably failed to impress. Again, the last thing you would want would be for Amanda to seem actually to be attracted to Tim.

Though Michael Stroka, in spite of his line bobbles, does a good job as Aristide, there is one moment today when he does make a bad mistake. Aristide makes a big deal out of his dagger, which he initially called “The Dancing Girl.” The prop is obviously just a flat piece of wood, which we might be able to accept if we don’t have to look at it for an extended period. But when he is threatening Amanda today, he holds “The Dancing Girl’s” blade in the palm of his hand, squeezes it, rolls it around, and caresses it. If there were a sharp edge anywhere on it, his hand would be bleeding profusely. They really are not making it easy for us to believe Aristide is going to cut anyone.

Episode 812: The back road to salvation

Denise Nickerson joined the cast of Dark Shadows in #632 as nine year old Amy Jennings, sister of the doomed Chris (Don Briscoe.) As Amy, Nickerson was central to the show for the next fourteen weeks. In #701 we traveled back in time and Dark Shadows became a costume drama set in 1897. In that year, Nickerson is Nora Collins. Nora was in 10 episodes in the first twelve weeks of 1897, and apart from a two episode stint in #782 and #783 has been unseen and very nearly unmentioned in the ten weeks since. The 1897 segment is packed with so many lively characters that even the best of them disappear for long periods, but the extended neglect of Nora is particularly disappointing. Nickerson was an outstanding young actress, brought out interesting qualities in her scene-mates, and had drawn a significant fan base among the show’s preteen viewers.

Nickerson is back today. In Act One, she walks in on her father Edward trying to strangle her Uncle Quentin. Nora’s scream distracts Edward and saves Quentin. When Nora asks Quentin what got into her father, he tells her that it’s something like a magic spell and will end soon. He refuses to explain further. It is unclear why Nora accepts this refusal. For our part, the audience accepts it because Edward’s attack on Quentin has nothing to do with today’s episode. It’s just left over from yesterday’s cliffhanger.

Don Briscoe is also back, after an absence of twelve episodes. In 1897, he plays Tim Shaw, persecuted schoolteacher turned adventurer. As Chris, Briscoe would do a little W. C. Fields imitation from time to time, occasionally ending a sentence with Fields’ signature inflections. This would raise a smile from other characters in 1969, when such a habit was relatively fashionable. Considering that Fields’ persona was that of a man who belonged in the Gay Nineties, we should have suspected when we first saw the date 1897 that Briscoe would have an opportunity to develop his Fields imitation in greater depth. Indeed, we see him today wearing a hat and coat that might have come from Fields’ closet, accompanied by exactly the sort of woman whom Fields’ characters reliably failed to impress.

I regret to inform you that Tim does not, at any point, address Amanda as “My little chickadee.”

Tim has been in New York, where he made a great deal of money in a very short time by means of something which he keeps in a small box. Returning viewers know that this thing is The Hand of Count Petofi, and that it is the object of a desperate search by many dangerous people, including Quentin. We also know that the Hand is not subject to anyone’s control. If it has made Tim rich, that is because it wanted to do so for purposes of its own, not because Tim had any skill in manipulating it. Tim has used his riches to purchase the companionship of Amanda Harris, a cynical young woman who is impatient with him and appalled at the smallness of the village of Collinsport.

Tim and Amanda are staying at the Collinsport Inn. The Inn was a very important part of the show for its first 40 weeks, when one of the principal storylines was The Revenge of Burke Devlin. Like Tim, Burke was a working class boy from Collinsport who was framed for a homicide of which he was only technically guilty, and who then went to New York City, made a huge amount of money in a very short time, and came back to his home town to even the score with those who set him up to take the blame for a crime for which they were even more responsible than he was. Burke lived at the Inn, and it represented his territory, in opposition to the great house of Collinwood where his adversaries lived. The Revenge of Burke Devlin storyline never really took off, and by #201 Burke himself lost interest in it. Since then, we have gone months at a time without seeing the Inn. We saw a guest room there in #698, but I can’t remember the last time we saw the lobby before today.

Tim orders Amanda to hide the box in her room, then sends her off to Collinwood to make a connection with the cruel and lecherous Rev’d Gregory Trask. Amanda tells Trask that she has been under the power of an evil man and that she wants to change her ways. Trask tells her that he will give her spiritual guidance. He has his back to her when he says that his plan requires that he provide her with “private instruction”; he isn’t looking at her when she rolls her eyes at this. Back in the Inn, Amanda tells Tim that he was right, Trask is despicable.

While Amanda and Tim are taking a stroll by the waterfront, Quentin ransacks Tim’s room looking for the Hand. Quentin hears them on their way back, and leaps out Tim’s window. They’ve gone out of their way to make it clear that Tim’s room is upstairs- we heard Tim on his telephone telling the front desk to send Amanda “up” to him, and we saw him and Amanda getting on the staircase to go to the room. So they are inviting us to wonder how Quentin climbs down the side of the building.

When Tim sees the shambles in his room, he sends Amanda to her room to make sure the box is still there. It is, but he decides that the Inn is not a safe enough place for the Hand. He takes the box to Nora in her bedroom at Collinwood. Regular viewers know that Tim was Nora’s teacher, and Nora considers him her friend. It may seem odd that the person Tim turns to when he needs help with such a sensitive matter is nine years old, but longtime viewers will again remember Burke. He had a way with children; he immediately won the devotion of strange and troubled boy David Collins, and Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, remembered him very fondly from her own childhood. Burke and David trusted each other in delicate situations more than once, and we can see the same thing happening between Tim and Nora.

Nora promises to hide the box somewhere in the house and not to tell anyone about it. Tim leaves, and Nora puts the box in her armoire. Nora is a fairly responsible person, but she is nine, and the box is wrapped like a present. As we fade to the credits, she is opening the box.

This leaves us wondering not only how Nora will react to the sight of the Hand, which is a gruesome thing, but also what effect it will have on Nora’s own appearance. In #784, lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley looked at the Hand, and it responded to his gaze by disfiguring his face. A few days later, it disfigured Quentin as well. Evan and Quentin have both regained their good looks, frustratingly without explanation. But it would be intensely unpleasant to see little Nora’s face mangled, even temporarily, so this is quite an effective cliffhanger for viewers who have been watching for several weeks.

This episode not only features the welcome returns of Nickerson, Briscoe, and the Inn’s lobby after their absences; it brings an equally welcome newcomer. Amanda Harris is played by Donna McKechnie, six years before she originated the role of Cassie in A Chorus Line and thereby became a permanent star of Broadway. Reviewing TV episodes on the 56th anniversaries of their original airing, recent news about the cast is often sad. For example, Lara Parker died very shortly before the 56th anniversary of the first broadcast of an episode in which she appeared as wicked witch Angelique. I call the cast members by their surnames, and put courtesy titles in front of the surnames of living people. I could have cried when I had to call her simply “Parker.” But Miss McKechnie is alive and well. Just yesterday, I saw a YouTube video (one of two posted on 23 July) of a panel featuring Miss McKechnie at a Dark Shadows convention on 19 July with Kathryn Leigh Scott, Marie Wallace, Sharon Smyth Lentz, and Matt Hall.

Episode 800: Nothing further to lose

When broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi learned that her sister Jenny had been murdered, she placed a curse on the murderer, Jenny’s husband Quentin Collins. The curse makes Quentin and his male descendants werewolves. In #763, Magda learned that Jenny had given birth to Quentin’s twin children, and ever since she has been trying desperately to lift the curse. It was only this week Quentin found out about the children, after another witch’s curse had already claimed the life of the boy twin. Now he and Magda are debating what risks they should take in their further efforts to save Quentin and any descendants his infant daughter may have.

In #778, Magda returned to her home in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. She had gone to Boston because she had heard that a Rroma group was in the area and that an old woman who knew how to cure werewolves might be among them. The woman wasn’t there, so Magda did the next best thing. She infiltrated the private quarters of a tribal leader/ organized crime boss known as King Johnny Romana and stole his prized possession. This is a severed hand in a wooden box. It is known as “The Hand of Count Petofi,” after a Hungarian nobleman from whom it was detached over hundred years before, and it has magic powers.

Neither Magda nor anyone she knows has the slightest idea how to control the hand. It has not cured Quentin, briefly disfigured him and his sometime friend Evan Hanley, led to the death of a young woman named Julianka, has been stolen by one person after another, and must soon bring an emissary of King Johnny tasked with Magda’s murder. Moreover, two mysterious and unsavory men known as Aristide and Victor Fenn Gibbon have come to town intent on stealing the hand; at Fenn Gibbon’s bidding, Aristide tortured Quentin and tried to kill him last week, and now he is trying to lure him into a deal.

Magda tells Quentin he is a fool to do business with Aristide and Fenn Gibbon, but Quentin says they have nothing to lose. Aristide implied that Fenn Gibbon can lift the curse; no one else can. They find Fenn Gibbon and Aristide ransacking the Old House. Magda recognizes a design on one of Fenn Gibbon’s buttons. Fenn Gibbon and Quentin struggle, and Fenn Gibbon loses a prosthetic right hand. We have known all along that he was not using his right name, and Magda tells us who he really is. He is Count Petofi himself, still alive more than a century after his mutilation, come to reclaim the hand and all its powers.

Quentin seizes, not the Hand of Count Petofi, but the Hand of Mr Fenn Gibbon. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Magda and Quentin don’t actually have the hand or know where it is. It has been stolen yet again. This time it is in the possession of Tim Shaw, schoolteacher turned junior executive for the Collins family enterprises. Tim took the hand from the Old House when Magda was out. He takes it to Evan today. Evan is terrified of the hand. Tim threatens him with it. Evan tells Tim what he knows about the hand, and also confesses that he and the evil Gregory Trask brainwashed Tim some time ago and used him to murder Trask’s wife Minerva.

When Evan and Trask decided to use Tim for their evil scheme, he was an innocent. The audience may have known that Tim had the same last name as Raymond Shaw, the main character in The Manchurian Candidate, but nothing else about him suggested he was likely to be of use to sinister figures like Evan and Trask. With his theft of the hand and his interrogation of Evan, we see that Tim has lost his innocence. The stuffy and repressed pedagogue whom we first met was a better fit for Don Briscoe’s heavily interiorized acting style than were the parts he played when the show was set in 1968 and 1969, accursed brothers Tom and Chris Jennings. Briscoe often seemed to be at sea as a vampire or a werewolf, but when he has to show a tortured soul peeking out from inside a three-piece suit he does an expert job. Now that Tim is capable of driving the story, we have a chance to see what Briscoe can do with a starring role crafted for his particular strengths as an actor.

Episode 799: Who understands the Moon

Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi is in her home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. She takes a hatchet and chops a plastic model of a severed hand into two plastic models, each representing half of a severed hand. She then throws a handkerchief into the fireplace, all the while declaring that no further trouble will come from the hand. Later, she goes to the great house on the estate and tells handsome libertine Quentin Collins about this; to her surprise, he responds by flying into a rage and choking her.

Quentin’s rage abates when a huge image of the hand materializes in the room and floats towards Magda’s rear end. After she goes home, it materializes again and again drifts towards the same destination. With that, she runs outside.

Screenshots by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, some activity is going on at The Blue Whale tavern. One man asks another for information about Quentin. The inquirer is named Aristide; the other, Tim Shaw. Tim identifies himself as an employee of the Collins family. Tim tells Aristide that all he knows about Quentin is that he is an arrogant jerk and that the only reason his family lets him live in their mansion is that their grandmother’s will requires them to. Aristide says that he already knew those things, and he asks Tim to carry a message to Quentin.

Tim is in the foyer of the great house while Magda and Quentin are in the drawing room. He eavesdrops on their conversation about the hand. He overhears them saying that the hand is magical, that properly used its powers are limitless, and that it is in a box at Magda’s. After the hand’s second attempt to grope Magda’s buttocks drives her from her house, Tim sneaks in, finds the hand, and tells it that it is just what he needs.

The message Tim brought from Aristide invited Quentin to meet at The Blue Whale. Quentin goes and brings up something that happened a few days ago, when Aristide tied him to a table and tried to kill him. Aristide agrees that this was not a good plan. Aristide says that Quentin can be “cured”; returning viewers know that Quentin is a werewolf, and that it is for this condition that he wants a cure. Aristide admits that he does not know what the cure is; Quentin says that if he had claimed he did know, he would have killed him. But he says that someone else does know. Quentin learned yesterday that Aristide is in the service of a man whom he knows as Victor Fenn Gibbon; evidently Aristide was not aware Quentin had picked up on that, because he is alarmed when Quentin drops Fenn Gibbon’s name. Nonetheless, Quentin does agree to meet Aristide again, and to give him proof that he has the magical hand. Once he has been cured, Quentin will surrender the hand to him.

Before Magda entered the drawing room at the great house, Quentin had been talking with Miss Charity Trask, his sister’s new stepdaughter. Returning viewers know that Charity’s father, the evil Gregory Trask, has decided she ought to marry Quentin. This scene is the first time we see Charity trying to follow this plan. She mentions that Quentin is a widower. It has not been clear to us whether this is generally known. His wife Jenny was hidden away the year before, after he left her, and she was buried very quickly after he murdered her in #748. For all we know, Charity may not know that Jenny is dead, or even that she ever existed. Quentin’s siblings have been holding information about Jenny very tightly; it was just yesterday that Quentin learned Jenny bore twins while he was away. At the same time, he learned that one of those twins has died. He tells Charity that he is a father, and she is confused.

I don’t suppose any of this sounds very exciting, but it is a remarkably fast half-hour. The script is crisp and rapid; even viewers who haven’t missed an episode and know all the background will appreciate the air of mystery that arises from leaving so much unsaid and unexplained. And the actors are uniformly excellent. I can imagine a first-time viewer seeing this one and making a note to watch again tomorrow.

Episode 777: Two murderers at Collinwood

The opening voiceover, delivered by Kay Frye, tells us that a vampire named Dirk Wilkins has been destroyed. We hear that Dirk was the pawn of someone called Barnabas Collins, who hoped to use him to conceal a secret of his own. The narrator also says that “certain things cannot be forgotten, as Judith Collins will learn this day.” This implies that the day’s action will center on challenges in information management.

Returning viewers may not recognize Miss Frye’s voice. We have seen her as Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl, improbable fiancée of prankster Carl Collins, and victim of Dirk’s first murder. As narrator, Miss Frye forgoes Pansy’s rather uncertain East London accent. She also takes a different approach to the role of narrator than she had to that of Pansy. When we first saw her, Pansy was putting on an act for Carl’s benefit, and Pansy is a terrible actress. When Carl left, Pansy dropped her act and we could see that Miss Frye is as capable a performer as the character is a poor one. Today’s voiceover gives Miss Frye a still better role. The crass and cynical Pansy did not call for much nuance. But as narrator, Miss Frye speaks with a quiet urgency and subtle modulation of the voice that leaves us wondering what might have been had she been cast in a bigger part.

We cut to what regular viewers recognize as the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in the year 1897, where a man in a cassock is talking tenderly with a woman in a colorful dress. The man is very affectionate, even stroking the woman’s neck with two fingers.

Trask fingers Judith’s neck. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The woman is the Judith Collins mentioned in the opening voiceover; the man is the Rev’d Gregory Trask. It is not mentioned in the episode, but Trask is the keeper of a boarding school called Worthington Hall. Also unmentioned is that Trask conspired with a Satanist named Evan Hanley to brainwash a young man named Tim Shaw, one of the teachers at Worthington Hall, and that once he was under their control they used Tim to murder Trask’s wife Minerva. Trask wanted Minerva out of the way, evidently because he plans to marry Judith and take control of her vast fortune.

Judith is disconsolate at the thought that she was under Dirk’s control. While Trask is talking sweetly to Judith, Tim enters. Trask pulls a gun on him and instructs Judith to call the police and report that Minerva’s murderer has been captured.

Tim, who has up to this point ranged from mousy to timid to utterly defeated, is suddenly assertive. He tells Judith that she won’t want to telephone the sheriff. He says that there are two murderers at Collinwood, and she is one of them.

Tim says that he came upon Judith in the act of shooting neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond to death. Returning viewers know that this is true; Tim, Judith, and Rachel were all under Dirk’s power at the time, and for reasons that made sense only to the dim-witted Dirk he ordered Judith to kill Rachel. A vague memory comes back to Judith and prompts her to confess; when Trask realizes that Tim will not back down from his accusation and Judith will not participate in a cover-up, he tells Tim he will make a deal with him.

Trask calls the sheriff. He addresses himself to “Sheriff Furman,” a name we have not heard before. It quickly becomes clear that we are not likely to hear it again. He tells the sheriff that Tim was out of town the night Minerva was poisoned and that, in his grief, he had forgotten this fact. Returning viewers know that Evan has told the sheriff that he saw Tim with Minerva while she was dying. One might assume that Trask would at least have to call Evan first to ensure that he gave the sheriff a story to account for this discrepancy, but Trask doesn’t bother to contact Evan at all. Evidently the sheriff is such an abysmal moron that Trask can safely assume he won’t think of any questions.

Sheriff Furman’s manifest incompetence prompts one of Danny Horn’s funniest posts at Dark Shadows Every Day, in which he writes a series of hypothetical police reports about the killings we have seen so far in the 1897 segment. One of Danny’s recurring themes is that law enforcement characters on Dark Shadows serve only to delay the plot. There is so much story in 1897 that the producers saw no need to slow things down, so it shouldn’t be surprising that neither Sheriff Furman nor any of his deputies appear on-screen.

For my part, I wish they had stayed in 1897 considerably longer, so I would have liked to spend one day a week or so without much forward narrative movement. That might have included some episodes when the police show up and you do a lot of recapping, some built around character studies of the type Joe Caldwell wrote so well in 1967, some in which we reconnect with Collinwood as it is on the night in 1969 when Barnabas left for the past, and so on. Not only would that have extended the show’s strongest period and helped new viewers catch up to what is going on, it would also have enabled them to make more use of the many fine actors whom we go weeks on end without seeing. Even David Selby, whose handsome rake Quentin Collins is breaking out as a pop culture sensation at this point, hasn’t been on the show since #768. Other fan favorites are in the midst of even longer unexplained absences; for example, Lara Parker’s wicked witch Angelique has not been seen since #760.

Tim, who was out of the room while Trask was on the phone, returns. He “gladly!” agrees to leave Trask’s employ, and at first says that he will “gladly” leave the village of Collinsport. But then it dawns on him that he needs a job, and he blackmails Judith into assuring him that she will find a place for him in her business.

This will remind longtime viewers of the spring and early summer of 1967. At that time, Dark Shadows took place in a contemporary setting, and there were two major storylines. One was the introduction of the vampire Barnabas Collins. The other was the blackmail of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard by seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Like Judith, Liz owns all of the Collins family’s assets; also like her, she is played by Joan Bennett. Threatening to expose the terrible secret that she was a murderer, Jason forced Liz to take him into her home, pay his debts, give him a job, and agree to marry him. When she finally balked rather than go through with the marriage, it turned out Liz wasn’t a murderer after all, the whole thing was a scam Jason cooked up.

Jason was a short-term character brought on to tie up the last non-supernatural narrative loose ends and fill time while Barnabas found his footing, as witness the casting of Dennis Patrick, who refused to sign a contract for the role since he wanted to be free to move to Los Angeles without giving more than 24 hours notice. But in those days, before the internet or soap opera magazines, the audience had no way of knowing that. They may well have thought that Barnabas would be destroyed and Jason’s oppression of Liz would become the show’s backbone.

In yesterday’s episode, a vampire was in fact destroyed. In May and June 1967, Barnabas’ chief victim was Maggie Evans, who like Rachel was played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. It was possible then that he would kill Maggie and that she would rise as a vampire, as Lucy Westenra did in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, compelling the good guys to stake her. Rachel doesn’t become a vampire, but Trask does tell the sheriff that it was the men hunting Dirk who shot her, accidentally. So when the final appearances of Dirk and Rachel lead to Judith both submitting to blackmail because of her mistaken belief that she is a murderer and taking steps towards marrying an overwhelmingly evil man, longtime viewers will remember a resolution that seemed to be on the horizon back in 1967.

Carl enters. Judith has no patience for her childish brother, and dismisses his concerns about Pansy. She tells Carl to go with Tim to the Old House on the estate. Tim took Rachel to the Old House when she was dying. Barnabas, who has traveled back in time to 1897, is staying there, and he had befriended Rachel. Tim had hoped Barnabas would help them, but it was daylight and he was not available. Rachel died in the Old House, and Tim left her corpse there when he came to the great house.

When Carl and Tim leave, Trask warns Judith that she almost gave herself away. “You must be more cautious, Judith! Even Carl was suspicious.” Judith agrees, showing that Trask is luring her into his world of lies.

We see Tim and Carl at the Old House. Rachel’s body is no longer there. Who took it, and why didn’t Tim and Carl leave with them? We are not told. Carl goes on about how wonderful Pansy is, and says he is going to the police because he thinks someone at Collinwood has done her harm. Evidently Carl’s suspicions are more highly developed than Trask realizes. Trask underestimates Carl because he is focused exclusively on Rachel and Tim. He never met Pansy, and knows nothing about her.

Carl leaves the house, and Pansy’s ghost appears to Tim. Tim is bewildered, and asks Pansy if she is looking for Barnabas. That is a natural assumption- after all, it is Barnabas’ house and Tim has no idea who Pansy is. When she vanishes into thin air, he shouts for Carl. He finds Carl not far outside the door, and describes the woman he saw. Carl jumps to the conclusion that she is Pansy, and starts calling for her. He sends Tim along to the great house, and continues searching for Pansy.

Evidently Carl’s search did not take long, because we see him standing next to Tim in the drawing room at the great house in the next shot. It is Rachel’s funeral.

Trask delivers a eulogy in which he says of Rachel that “The littlest angels have a new teacher.” Even first-time viewers are likely to laugh out loud at this ridiculous turn of phrase, and those who have been with the show for a while will see more in it than that. From childhood on, Rachel was Trask’s prisoner, first as one of the pupils imprisoned in his horrible school, then when he extorted her into staying on as a teacher with threats that he would have her prosecuted on false charges of theft and murder if she tried to leave. He made flagrant sexual advances to her as well, all the more hideous because he has been responsible for her since she was a small girl. In Rachel and Tim’s helpless personalities, we saw what can happen when a criminal like Trask is given an opportunity to turn a person into filet of human being, and an ominous sign of what might lie in store for Judith’s nephew and niece Jamison and Nora, who are currently among the inmates at Worthington Hall.

Tim and Carl bury Rachel themselves. My wife, Mrs Acilius, asked “Isn’t this usually handled by professionals?” Presumably whoever took Rachel’s body from the Old House would have been a better choice for the work than are Tim and Carl, but that isn’t the Collins way.

Tim announces his intention to get drunk. Carl brings up other things they might do, and Tim says that those will have to wait until after he gets drunk. After Tim leaves to pursue his eminently sound plan, Carl hears Pansy singing. He wonders if she is dead. He realizes that her voice is coming from the mausoleum which we know to have been Barnabas’ longtime home. Carl is played by John Karlen, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s plays the luckless Willie Loomis. It was Willie who inadvertently released Barnabas from the mausoleum, so longtime viewers who see this actor on this set will expect something important to happen in the story.

Episode 774: Sometimes people change their roles in life

Tim Shaw, uptight teacher turned victim of brainwashing turned fugitive murder suspect, makes his way into an abandoned root cellar. He finds a coffin there. Naturally, he opens the coffin. That’s what everyone does on Dark Shadows when they find a coffin where one shouldn’t be. You meet the most interesting people that way.

Tim finds that the coffin is empty, and goes into a dark corner to hide. Someone comes to the door, and Tim gets up to greet whoever it might be. He hasn’t been a fugitive very long, and hasn’t quite perfected all the skills that the status calls for.

Tim sees Dirk Wilkins, a dimwitted servant of the ancient and esteemed Collins family who has been missing for several days. Tim calls out “Dirk!” This is the first time we learn the two men know each other. They are unlikely to have been friends. Tim rarely left the school where he worked. The school has been housed in a building on the Collins family’s estate for several weeks, so it makes sense that he and Dirk would have met, but Dirk has been unpleasant to everyone we have seen him with, including his employers and pretty girls he wants to attract. It is hard to imagine the painfully shy Tim befriending him.

Dirk turns out to be a vampire, and he bites Tim. We then cut back to the school. The headmaster, the overwhelmingly evil Gregory Trask, is browbeating Tim’s fellow teacher and onetime girlfriend, neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond. Returning viewers will recall that Trask has made flagrant passes at Rachel, and also know that Trask conspired with a local Satanist to cast a spell on Tim which caused him to kill Trask’s wife Minerva. Trask is pretending to be upset about Minerva’s murder and to believe that Rachel plotted with Tim to commit it. He tells Rachel that if she does not leave the school, he will accept that she is innocent. She goes to her room, distraught. Later in the episode, Trask will telephone his co-conspirator, gloating that the authorities are on their side.

Spinster Judith Collins, sole proprietor of all her family’s great wealth, shows up to offer her condolences to Trask. They find that Rachel is gone, and he tells her that she must have gone with Tim. Trask realizes that Tim and Rachel have no money, and wonders if there is anyone who might give them enough to allow them to flee the state. Judith says that her distant cousin Barnabas Collins, who is currently staying at the Old House on the estate, is very fond of Rachel and that he might give them some money. She says that she will get in her carriage and go to the Old House before Rachel can get there. She will tell Barnabas about the murder and about Tim and Rachel’s involvement in it, thereby ensuring that he will not give them any money.

Judith consoles he new widower. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Judith knocks on the front door of the Old House and gets no answer. She enters, and finds the house empty. She is still in the front parlor when Dirk enters. She chastises him for staying on her property after she dismissed him, and tells him she will call the police if he is not gone within 24 hours. He walks towards her, backing her against the wall and ignoring her demands that he let her leave. He says that he is no longer her servant, but that she will soon be his. He bites her.

Judith was right when she told Trask that Rachel would go to the Old House. Rachel does go there. She peeks in the window, sees Judith sitting in a chair, and scurries off. This is rather an odd moment- Judith told Trask just a few minutes before that she would go to the Old House in her carriage. It seems unlikely that she drove her own carriage and there is no driver waiting outside, but even if if she did the carriage must still be sitting there in full view. How did Rachel fail to notice it?

Trask comes to the Old House and tells Judith he wanted to offer her his support in her conversation with Barnabas. Trask knows how fond Barnabas is of Rachel, and may well suppose that he would want more details about Minerva’s death than Judith could offer before he agreed to regard Rachel as a criminal. Judith says Dirk’s name when Trask enters, and when Trask notices the bleeding wounds on her neck he quickly realizes that Dirk inflicted them.

We cut back to the root cellar, which we see Rachel entering. She sees the coffin, and of course opens it. That’s just good manners. She turns, and sees Dirk in the entryway.

In his post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn transcribes a conversation among Roger Davis, Jerry Lacy, and director Lela Swift captured on video when the three were on a panel at a convention:

Roger Davis: I do remember being very excited when I got to be a vampire on the show, so excited, and the first person that I got to bite was Joan Bennett, and I was so enthusiastic and excited I knocked her over — flat on her back!

Jerry Lacy: I remember when you did it, it was rehearsal in the morning.

Roger: Was it?

Jerry: Yeah. You grabbed her, and you bit her, and then you just threw her. And she was already sixty years old then.

Lela Swift: Then we had to pick Joan up and put her together again.

Danny Horn, “Episode 774: What’s Up, Dirk,” posted at Dark Shadows Every Day, 21 November 2015.

To which my comment is, fuck that guy. I don’t make a habit of swearing, but there are not enough curse words in the language to express my reaction to Mr Davis chortling through his reminiscences of physically abusing his female scene partners. He can fuck off straight to hell.

This story gives an extra dimension to the scene between Judith and Trask in the Old House. Mr Lacy plays Trask’s relentless evil so effectively that he is difficult to watch; my wife, Mrs Acilius, refuses to watch his episodes this time through the series. It usually makes a viewer’s skin crawl to see Trask posing as a representative of something good. But knowing that behind Trask in the position of standing by Judith after she had been attacked by Dirk was Jerry Lacy standing by Joan Bennett after she had been attacked by Roger Davis, our response is much more complex. After all the times we might have wondered how anyone could fail to see through Trask’s blatant hypocrisy, this time enough of the thoroughly decent humanity of Jerry Lacy peeks through that we can understand why Judith has been so supportive of Trask.

The cast went into makeup after the morning rehearsal. From the looks of Dirk’s fake mustache and artificial pallor, makeup artist Vincent LoScalzo must not have brought his usual enthusiasm to his work when Mr Davis sat in his chair. The mustache in particular is so crudely affixed that it looks like Mr Davis might have done his own makeup today.

Episode 773: Tear up the card

A little over two weeks ago, Dark Shadows started an homage to The Manchurian Candidate, with some touches added from Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades. The overwhelmingly evil Rev’d Gregory Trask, keeper of a sadistic cult disguised as a boarding school, coerced Satanist Evan Hanley into casting a spell on Tim Shaw, one of the teachers at the school. When Tim sees the Queen of Spades, he will be prompted to poison Trask’s wife Minerva.

The whole point of employing an assassin is to give yourself an unbreakable alibi. Since Tim will not remember Evan or the spell once he has killed Minerva, the logical thing would seem to be to arrange it so that Tim poisons Minerva in front of several witnesses and that he still has the vial of poison on him when he is caught. But instead, Evan himself turns up as Minerva is in her death throes, and he is the only witness. After Evan erases Tim’s memory, Tim defeats Evan in a sword fight, then runs away, taking the poison with him. Tim flees to his only friend, fellow teacher Rachel Drummond, and tells her that if it is a matter of Evan’s word against his, he will have no chance in court. Later, Evan confronts Rachel and roughs her up, trying to intimidate her out of helping Tim in any way.

Evan is reduced to having a sword fight with Tim. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Absent witnesses to accuse Tim on his behalf or an alibi for himself, Evan may as well have skipped the whole brainwashing bit. Had he simply strangled Minerva and claimed he saw Tim do it, he would be in exactly the position he is in now.

The problem for Evan’s plan is that it is taking place at this point in the series. The segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897 is stuffed to bursting with vivid characters, each of them involved in at least one dynamic storyline. That makes it, from most points of view, the best part of the show, but it also makes it very difficult to get a bunch of people together. Any two characters you put in the same scene are likely to join plot threads together in new and consequential ways. That makes for a lot of excitement, but it makes it very difficult to do just one thing at a time.

For example, say Tim had insisted on bringing Minerva the poisoned tea while in the drawing room at the great house of Collinwood with rich spinster Judith Collins, Judith’s brother Edward, and Minerva’s daughter Charity, while maidservant Beth waits on the company. Trask is apparently scheming to marry Judith and get her money once Minerva is out of the way. Put her in Minerva’s death scene, and you accelerate that part of the story, perhaps beyond the pace you are prepared to follow up. Edward is starting to suspect that his distant cousin, recently arrived Barnabas Collins, might be a vampire. Those suspicions are the result of two qualities in which Edward is no more than average, his ability to notice the obvious and his concern for his son. But if you make him a participant in another story about a crime, any remarks he might make that would display any brainpower whatever would transform him into the show’s resident sleuth. Beth and Charity are both blood thralls of Barnabas’; if either of them were in the room while the poisoning took place, we would therefore expect them to go directly to him and start wondering how he would react to the news. That would shift our focus to him, subordinating the Tim and Minerva story to the Barnabas story. Virtually every other character is disqualified from serving as a witness for similar reasons, leaving Evan to do the honors himself.

In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, I summed up my view of both this story and of the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate:

Two of the things that make THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE work so well are that we don’t see any of Raymond Shaw’s training, and that when he sees the Queen of Diamonds he goes into a trance that strips him of all personality.

The training scenes here show why the first of those was so important. Not only are the scenes tedious, they force us to realize that the very idea we most have to take seriously is in fact preposterous. Whatever power you might imagine hypnosis or drugs or other conditioning techniques to have, they obviously couldn’t turn a human brain into a digital computer.

And Tim’s talkativeness while in his trance shows why the second element is essential. Raymond might do absolutely anything when he’s in his hyper-suggestible state. A bartender mentions the phrase “Go jump in a lake” and Raymond jumps in the nearest lake. That’s terrifying, because it is terrifying to think of what people might do who had no mind or will controlling their actions from moment to moment. But Tim’s endless chit-chat doesn’t suggest a soulless automaton. There seems to be a mind in there, it just isn’t a very nice or very interesting mind.

Don Briscoe’s performance doesn’t add much to this unpromising material. I can’t think of anything he might have done to make it work, and neither could he. Anyway, I’m glad it’s over.

Comment left 8 November 2020 by Acilius on “Episode 773: The Persecution and Assassination of Minerva Trask as Performed by Tim Shaw under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 21 November 2015

Episode 772: Apologies are the Devil’s invention

The opening voiceover plays over this image, a type of visual effect we have not seen before at the beginning of an episode:

A transparent sticker of Barnabas superimposed on the exterior of the Old House. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas Collins has bitten dimwitted servant Dirk Wilkins, turning Dirk into a vampire like himself. Barnabas has been out all night, searching for Dirk’s hiding place. He hopes to expose Dirk and frame him for his own crimes.

Barnabas comes home to the Old House on the estate of Collinwood to find that Dirk seems to be trying to do the same thing to him. There is a blood-drained corpse in an armchair in his front parlor. It is that of Miss Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl and Dirk’s first victim.

Barnabas’ distant cousins live in the great house on the estate. One of them, prankster Carl Collins, brought Pansy home with the intention of making her his bride. No sooner does Barnabas discover Pansy’s remains than Carl starts banging on the front door, shouting that he wants to speak with her.

Barnabas hides what’s left of Pansy in a secret chamber behind a bookcase, then lets Carl in. Grisly as the circumstances are, one person lying to another about the presence of a third nearby is a stock situation from farce, and John Karlen and Jonathan Frid play the scene with the particular brand of desperate seriousness that only works in farce. Barnabas persuades Carl to go away and search the grounds of the estate.

That takes a few minutes, starting from what the opening voiceover told us in so many words was “an hour before dawn.” In what remains of that hour, Barnabas takes Pansy’s body to a cemetery and buries her in a shallow grave between tombstones, telling her to “rest in peace.”

Barnabas buries Pansy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas comes home, and finds Carl, who has in the interval not only gone to the great house, the groundskeeper’s cottage, and a house on the estate which is currently occupied by a school, but has also gone into the village of Collinsport and made inquiries about Pansy. A speedy bunch, the Collinses.

Before Barnabas returned to the house, Carl had heard Pansy’s disembodied voice singing the song she had so memorably performed for Barnabas in yesterday’s episode. He had spoken to Pansy’s voice telling her that his grandmother’s will gave him a house to live in and that she could live there with him. This is puzzling for returning viewers. In #714, it was made perfectly clear that the will did not mention Carl at all. Edith Collins left her entire estate to Carl’s sister Judith, and the only one of the brothers who was mentioned was Quentin, who received no money or negotiable assets of any kind but who was guaranteed the right to stay at Collinwood as long as he pleased. Perhaps they are retconning that away, perhaps Carl is lying to Pansy, or perhaps Carl is losing his grip on reality.

Whether or not we are supposed to doubt Carl’s sanity, Barnabas talks Carl into suspecting that he might have hallucinated Pansy’s voice. Carl leaves, and Barnabas has time to return to his coffin before dawn.

The rest of the episode is taken up with doings at the school Carl had visited. We saw Carl questioning Charity Trask, daughter of the school’s master, the overwhelmingly evil Gregory Trask. The prim Charity was exasperated that Carl kept asking about Pansy after she had already denied having seen her. The scene is an interesting one- Charity and Pansy are such total opposites that it is a shame they never met. It would be amusing to see them juxtaposed.

Charity is engaged to marry Tim Shaw, a teacher at the school. Neither of them is happy about this situation. Tim was in love with Rachel Drummond, another of the teachers, and Charity is Barnabas’ blood thrall. But Gregory blackmailed Tim and bullied Charity into accepting the arrangement.

Charity’s mother, prudish Minerva Trask, does not like Tim or want him as a son-in-law. She urges Charity to set her sights on Carl. Charity says that she would rather marry Barnabas; Minerva says that her instincts are sound, but that she ought not to settle for a cousin of the rich Collinses when one of the brothers is available. Even if they have retconned Carl into owning a house, he is clearly not a rich man, so this reveals that Minerva knows as little about his financial position as she does about the curse under which Barnabas labors.

Charity tries to engage Tim in conversation, and is baffled that he is not willing to talk to her. Indeed, he does not seem like himself at all. Not only is he dismissive with Charity, but when Minerva confronts him he is bold and insolent, a far cry from the broken man we have seen interacting with the Trasks previously. When Charity tells him their engagement is off, he does not express the relief that she and we expect, but puts on a stagey voice we have not heard him use before and marches off to apologize to her mother.

There is a reason for Tim’s behavior. Gregory enlisted warlock Evan Hanley to brainwash Tim so that he would kill Minerva. There is some business with the Queen of Spades, first when Tim mutters the phrase “Queen of Spades,” then when Evan sends him a note on which is scrawled “Queen of Spades,” and lastly when he walks in on Minerva playing solitaire and sees her turn up the Queen of Spades. Many viewers in 1969 would have remembered Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate and its 1962 film version. In Condon’s novel, Raymond Shaw became a robot capable of murder when he saw the Queen of Hearts; in the film, the card was the Queen of Diamonds. Many first time viewers, seeing Tim Shaw’s reaction to the Queen of Spades, would have made the connection and understood why he ends the episode by poisoning Minerva’s tea.

Is this your card? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Tim Shaw differs from Raymond Shaw in that he is under a spell for a long while, including the whole time we see him today, and he can talk and act independently while it operates on him. Raymond simply became catatonic when he saw the card and remained that way until he heard a command. He then executed the command and came back to himself once he was finished. Tim’s behavior may suggest a nod to another literary work, Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades.” That tale, which Tchaikovsky turned into an opera and which in 1949 was made into a feature film, is about a timid man who inadvertently kills a powerful woman and loses control of himself as a consequence. Like Tim, Captain Herman is coerced into marrying a woman he does not love. Presented with an opportunity to get out of the marriage, he finds himself making extraordinary efforts to go through with it, efforts which bring about his ultimate downfall.

Episode 764: A primitive tribe

Odds and ends today:

The Kindest, Warmest, Bravest, Most Wonderful Human Being I’ve Ever Known in My Life

The show is doing an homage to The Manchurian Candidate this week, with schoolteacher Tim Shaw brainwashed into becoming an assassin when he sees the Queen of Spades. We open with the plan going awry. Lawyer/ warlock Evan Hanley did the brainwashing with the intention that Tim would kill someone else, but when he shows Tim the card, Tim tries to kill him. As Evan, Humbert Allen Astredo shows us a man suddenly becoming frightened and just as suddenly making up his mind to be brave. In other episodes, Astredo has already shown us Evan responding to fear in other ways. He really was a remarkably good actor, and it is a pleasure to see how much variety he can find in his parts.

Later, we see Judith Collins, the mistress of Collinwood, playing solitaire. Tim comes to the house. We know that each episode ends with a cliffhanger, and so this leads us to expect that we will end today with Tim’s hands around Judith’s throat. But that is a misdirection. In fact, Judith turns the Queen of Spades away from Tim at the last second, and he leaves the room without attacking her.

Slight Enough to Vanish, But Too Dense to Live

Tim’s brainwashing is a B-story on the show right now, and it would throw off the rhythm of the week to end two consecutive episodes with cliffhangers from it. The A-story is about the rakish Quentin Collins, who has been cursed to become a werewolf. There is a full moon tonight, and the sheriff’s department is roaming the grounds of the great estate of Collinwood with guns looking for the wolf who walks like a man. Joining in the search is Quentin’s distant cousin, Barnabas Collins, who is, unknown to all but a very few people, a vampire. Barnabas has traveled back in time to the year 1897, and among the things he is hoping to do is to learn how the werewolf curse that has afflicted his friend Chris Jennings in the 1960s first began.

Barnabas learned in 1969 that in 1897 Quentin and a woman named Beth Chavez paid a man named Ezra Braithwaite to make a silver pendant in the form of a pentagram and that a baby boy was buried in that year wearing that pendant. Tonight, Ezra telephones Barnabas at the great house of Collinwood and tells him that Beth just came in, ordered such a pendant, and told him to send the bill to Quentin.

Barnabas knows that the pentagram was an amulet meant to ward off werewolves. Beth is Quentin’s girlfriend, a fact that is no secret to anyone, not even Barnabas. So you might assume Barnabas would have figured out that Quentin is the werewolf. But apparently he has not. He materializes inside Beth’s room and demands she tells him who the werewolf is. When she refuses, he bites her. That bite is the cliffhanger.

Dear cousin Barnabas. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas occasionally makes remarks about how he wants to keep the original timeline intact so that the people he knew in the 1960s will still be there when he gets back. But he’s been feasting on the people he meets in 1897 with abandon. Beth is the fourth resident of Collinwood he has bitten, and he has killed at least two young women in the village. Moreover, his approach to every problem he encounters or imagines is to confront the most powerful person associated with it and antagonize them immediately. It’s hard to see how he expects anything to remain unchanged after he inserts this rampage into the history of the late Victorian age.

But You Wouldn’t Know Anything About That

Judith tells Barnabas today that Beth came to Collinwood as a lady’s maid two years ago. Beth claims to have a cousin in town to Judith today while lying to cover up her trip to Braithwaite’s, and when Barnabas asks Judith if Beth is from Collinsport she mentions this cousin as her reason for believing that she is. Judith clearly knows very little about Beth, and cares less.

The lady who brought Beth as her maid was Quentin’s then-wife, Jenny, who was secretly a member of the Romani people. In #701 it was hinted that Beth was concealing a Romani origin of her own. Casting the tall, blonde, blue-eyed, pale Terrayne Crawford as Beth would seem to indicate that they were not committed to following up this hint, but in today’s scenes with Judith they do go out of their way to emphasize that Beth’s background is a mystery.

The Woman Who Never Left

Beth has been helping the family hide the fact that Jenny went mad and bore twins after Quentin left her. Quentin murdered Jenny in #748, eliminating the need for a servant to cover up her existence, and the twins, about whom Quentin does not know, are firmly ensconced in the care of a woman in the village named Mrs Fillmore. In #750, Judith fired Beth, but it didn’t take. Beth never left the house, and after a while the family started giving her orders again. Today Beth tells Judith that Mrs Fillmore reports that the boy twin is feverish, and asks to be kept on staff until he gets well. Judith agrees.

Judith tells Beth that she has decided to tell Quentin about the twins. She hopes that is what will prompt her brother to cast aside his selfish ways and become a mature adult. Beth is horrified and begs her not to do so. Judith, puzzled, says that Beth has always urged her to tell Quentin. She asks why she has changed her mind, and she makes up something obviously false about Quentin being unable to cope with the news that his son has a fever.

Yesterday, Beth learned that Quentin’s curse is hereditary. Returning viewers might wonder if she is afraid that Quentin will also learn that, and that if he does he might kill his children to prevent them passing it on. He does keep saying that he would rather be dead than have the curse, so he might talk himself into regarding such a murder as an act of mercy.

Featuring Edward Marshall as Ezra Braithwaite

Edward Marshall plays Ezra, a part played in #684 and #685 as an 87 year old man living in the year 1969 by Abe Vigoda (who was 48 at the time, but he and the makeup department both knew their business well enough that he was entirely convincing.) Mr Marshall appeared in #669 as unsightly ex-convict Harry Johnson, a part originally created by the not-always-stellar Craig Slocum. Mr Marshall gave Harry the same attitude and many of the same mannerisms Slocum had given him, but was so much more fun to watch that I wanted to see a lot more of him.

Parts of Harry’s costume and most of his surly demeanor are recycled in the 1897 segment in the character of dimwitted groundskeeper Dirk Wilkins, played by the repulsive Roger Davis. Whenever Dirk is on screen, I imagine Mr Marshall in Mr Davis’ place. I recommend that bit of mental recasting, it goes a long way towards making Dirk bearable. Unfortunately this is Mr Marshall’s final appearance on Dark Shadows.

Episode 763: An afternoon of cards, a night of murder

Schoolteacher Tim Shaw was introduced in #731. The name “Shaw” is common enough that few viewers are likely to have found any significance in it at the time. It is true that Dark Shadows is at this point a costume drama set in 1897 and that George Bernard Shaw was coming into his own as a playwright in that year. The show was written, acted, and directed largely by theater people, and is so self-consciously stagy that it is possible there might be a reference of some kind to Bernard Shaw in a character’s name. But there doesn’t seem to be anything especially Shavian about Tim.

Today we learn the reason Tim was called Shaw. Satanist Evan Hanley gives Tim a potion that robs him of his will. He holds up a deck of playing cards and tells him that when he sees the Queen of Spades he will know it is time for him to murder someone. In Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, soldier Raymond Shaw was brainwashed into becoming an assassin when he saw the Queen of Hearts; in the John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film based on the novel, Raymond’s trigger was the Queen of Diamonds.

Frankenheimer’s film is one of the supreme examples of a movie that shouldn’t have worked, but did. No part of the plot stands up to rational analysis for one second, but when the tale is told through stark black and white imagery that puts us deep in the world of a nightmare it is spellbinding. Unfortunately, the irrationality of the plan the villains carry out and of the other characters’ responses to their evil deeds in The Manchurian Candidate are on full display in this homage, without the paranoid verve that makes the movie compelling. All by itself the potion puts Tim so deep in Evan’s power that he gladly goes to witch Magda Rákóczi to buy poison and insists she sell it to him even after she has pointed out that it is useful for nothing but murder. It doesn’t seem there is anything left for the card to add to the control Evan has over him.

It gets worse. Evan is acting as the agent of the evil Rev’d Gregory Trask. Trask is unhappily married to a woman named Minerva, and is blackmailing Evan into sending an assassin to kill her. When Evan shows Tim the card today, he confirms that the intended victim is a woman. But why not have him kill Trask? As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, if Trask dies, Evan will be free of the threat of blackmail. So if he is prepared to be a party to murder, you’d think he would forget Minerva and commit the crime he has a motive to commit.

The highlight of today’s episode doesn’t have anything to do with Evan, Tim, Minerva, or Trask. It is a scene between Magda and sometime maidservant Beth.

Beth has come to the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood to plead with Magda to lift a curse she has placed on Beth’s boyfriend, rakish Quentin Collins. Quentin murdered his estranged wife, Magda’s sister Jenny, and as revenge Magda turned him into a werewolf. Magda is unimpressed with anything Beth says until she tells her that in spite of everything, she will marry Quentin and go away with him. Magda marvels at this and asks Beth if she will really go through with it knowing that any son Quentin might have will suffer from the same curse. Shocked, Beth asks Magda if she means what she has said, and she repeats that Quentin’s son will also be a werewolf. Beth replies that in that case, Magda has laid a curse upon her own kin.

Magda dismisses this, saying that Jenny had no children by Quentin. Beth says she is wrong, that Jenny bore twins, a boy and a girl. Beth lays the story out systematically, and it dawns on Magda that she is telling the truth. Magda calls out to Jenny’s spirit and begs forgiveness, saying she did not know. Beth says that it is time to lift the curse, and Magda tells her to get a pentagram and make sure the boy wears it all the days of his life. Beth has her own moment of horrified realization. “And… you can’t end it? Can you?”

Beth realizes Magda does not know how to undo the curse.

Terrayne Crawford had some weaknesses as an actress that severely undercut her in her first weeks as Beth. But this scene is right in her wheelhouse. She is flawless as she portrays Beth’s progression from weepy begging to methodical explanation to utter shock. And Grayson Hall of course brings great power and vivid color to Magda.

We’ve been waiting for this scene since #642, months before Magda first appeared in #701, let alone before she placed the curse on Quentin in #750. In that episode, back in December 1968, the show took place in a contemporary setting. The characters had noticed some strange goings-on, and held a séance as part of their inquiry. The spirit they reached was Magda, who spoke regretfully of “my currrrse!” It’s taken more than 24 weeks, but Magda has finally learned what she already knew when we first heard from her.