Evil wizard Tim Stokes combined medicine with black magic to connect his late daughter Angelique with a woman named Roxanne. The connection drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. This rendered Roxanne comatose and allowed Angelique to move among the living so long as Roxanne neither dies nor gets even a tiny bit better.
Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are interlopers from another dimension. They know what Stokes has done and want to defeat Angelique. They made off with Roxanne and were keeping her in the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, planning to use some mad science equipment to revive her. Roxanne did perk up after the first treatment, and Barnabas took her on a date to his favorite place, the old cemetery north of town, where she showed some signs of recognizing her surroundings.
Yesterday, Stokes went to the Old House to search for Roxanne while Barnabas was out. When Barnabas got home, Roxanne was nowhere to be found. We learn today that Stokes does not have her. He turns to a man named Claude North for help in finding her. Yesterday he told Angelique that he was most reluctant to contact North; only after an incantation calling upon all the spiritual forces of darkness fails to solve their problem does he consider turning to him. He told Angelique that North was no ordinary man, and he is evidently more unpleasant to deal with than are Satan and his minions. But he answers when Stokes picks up the telephone and calls him.
Barnabas is also familiar with “Claude North” as the name of someone linked to Roxanne. He found a drawing of her signed by North in the secret chamber in the back room of the mausoleum in the cemetery. He goes back to the cemetery twice tonight. The first time, he goes into the secret chamber and finds evidence that a man with the initials “CN” has been staying there. He takes this as confirmation that it is Claude North’s roost. It does not seem likely that it is North’s only residence, since there is no sign of a telephone there. Stokes is spying on Barnabas while he does this. He is disturbed that Barnabas knows about the secret chamber, and wonders if he has been keeping Roxanne there.
Barnabas goes back to the Old House and finds Stokes talking with the lady of the house, Carolyn Loomis. Angelique killed Carolyn’s husband Will the other day because he would not reveal Barnabas’ secret, and Carolyn has been drinking steadily ever since. Barnabas tells Stokes that since he has extended his condolences to Carolyn, he can leave now. Stokes takes his time about going. He says that Will thought that Barnabas might have a girl someplace. “Is he right, Mr Collins? Do you have a girl someplace?” Thayer David delivers this line with an urgency that elevates it from mildly clever to almost brilliant. Jonathan Frid responds with a slow burn that brings the exchange to perfection. Barnabas knows that Stokes neither has Roxanne nor knows that he does not have her, but he also knows that Stokes, as a native of this universe, is likelier to find her than he is.
“Do you have a girl someplace?” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Barnabas goes back to the cemetery and finds Roxanne there. She is kneeling at a gravestone. It marks the grave of Claude North, who lived from 1814 to 1866.
In his own world, Barnabas was trapped in the counterpart of the secret chamber in the mausoleum for 171 years. So regular viewers think of that chamber as a place for vampires. North’s tombstone suggests that he might be such a creature.
Moreover, the drawing of Roxanne evokes Charles Delaware Tate, an artist who was a character on the show in 1969. Tate had the magical power to bring people to life by drawing them. He became obsessed with a woman he created in that way. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, Tate’s erotic preoccupation with a product of his own imagination is as much a metaphor for extreme selfishness as is the vampire. So if the answer to the question of Roxanne’s origin is that she sprang into being as the result of North’s drawing of her, it would only be appropriate if North were also a vampire.
There is a scene in the room on top of the tower at the great house of Collinwood. Carolyn goes there and looks at the window from which Will fell to his death. To her surprise, sourpuss Quentin Collins enters the room. Quentin is a fugitive from justice, having assaulted a policeman and fled from jail because he was under arrest for murder. He makes menacing remarks demanding her silence; she’s so drunk that it doesn’t seem likely she will remember he was there. In the other continuity, the Collinses had a habit of using the tower room, which is entirely enclosed in windows that can be seen from every part of the estate, as a hiding place; we can see that their counterparts here maintain the same self-defeating tradition.
We open in the room atop the tower of the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Wicked witch Angelique, enemy of the mysterious Barnabas Collins, confronts Will Loomis, Barnabas’ henchman. She demands Will tell her Barnabas’ secret. Returning viewers know that Barnabas is a vampire, and Will is his blood thrall. When Will tells Angelique that he is incapable of betraying Barnabas, we know that he is making a literal statement of fact. But Angelique has power over Will, too. Caught between these opposing forces, Will does the only thing he can. He opens the window and flings himself to his death.
John Karlen plays Will, Lara Parker Angelique. In his post about this episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn observes that Karlen approached all of his parts as if he were in a play by Tennessee Williams. In a comment I left under that post, I said that while most of Karlen’s scene partners stuck with their own distinctive styles of acting while playing opposite him, resulting in surprisingly effective mashups of techniques that you wouldn’t think could coexist on any stage, Parker followed his volcanic lead in today’s first act. Will’s anguish and Angelique’s vehemence both go way over the top, but the result is far from hammy. Orson Welles famously said that hamminess is not overacting, it is false acting. There is nothing false between Will and Angelique today.
Just before Will jumped out the window, Julia Hoffman entered the room. Furious that Will has died without telling her what sort of creature Barnabas is, Angelique accuses Hoffman of startling him and ruining everything. Wondering if Will may have survived his fall, she orders Hoffman to accompany her to the foot of the tower. Hoffman kneels down and says that Will’s spinal cord snapped on impact resulting in instant death. Angelique says that she is intrigued by Hoffman’s diagnosis. “Have you a medical degree?”
Unknown to Angelique, the true answer would be yes. Angelique believes herself to be with Hoffman the housekeeper, her most fanatical devotee. In fact, the woman is Hoffman’s counterpart from an alternate universe, Dr Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia has followed her best friend Barnabas into this continuity and is assisting Barnabas in his battle against Angelique. Julia killed Hoffman and assumed her identity. Julia responds to Angelique’s puzzlement with a story about an incident when she saw a man fall from a roof and land in the same twisted position Will now holds. She remembered the words the doctor said when examining that man and merely repeated them when she saw Will’s distorted neck. Angelique compliments Julia on her extraordinary memory, and proceeds as if she were telling the truth. There seems little else she could do.
I remembered the line “Have you a medical degree?” from the first time Mrs Acilius and I watched Dark Shadows. Angelique has noticed that Julia is different from the Hoffman she knows, and has been showing signs of impatience with her. But she has not suspected she is a different person, only that she is going soft on her enemies. “Have you a medical degree?” makes it seem that might be changing. Julia may be in grave danger before long.
Barnabas rises from his coffin in the basement of Will’s house. He goes upstairs and finds Angelique waiting for him. She says she came, not to see him, but to console the widow Loomis. Thus Barnabas learns that Will has died.
Barnabas tells Angelique that he will avenge Will’s death upon her, but she tells him that he is the one to blame. It was because his power over Will matched hers that Will could respond to her commands only by killing himself.
Angelique’s counterpart in Barnabas’ own universe placed the curse that first made him a vampire. She was also wholly or partially responsible for the deaths of his mother, sister, aunt, uncle, fiancée, and many other people he cared about. So he reacts to the sight of this Angelique with barely controlled rage. For her part, she has no idea who he is, and does not know why he is hostile to her. She, therefore, is much cooler. The contrast is fascinating to watch, far more interesting than are the scenes between Barnabas and the other Angelique and one of the joys of the “Parallel Time” segment.
Julia and Barnabas are busy with a science project. They have learned that Angelique returned from the grave because her father, evil barfly Tim Stokes, somehow established a remote connection between her and a woman named Roxanne whom he keeps in the back room of his apartment. This connection, whatever it is, drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. This creates a delicate situation. If Roxanne dies, all of her “life force,” including that which animates Angelique, will vanish. But if she regains any of the force that has been taken from her, even enough to flutter her eyelids, Angelique will collapse and, unless Roxanne is brought back down to the prescribed level of debility, re-die.
When Julia and Barnabas first came upon Roxanne, they planned to kill her to finish Angelique off. Barnabas put the kibosh on that when he saw how pretty Roxanne was. Then they thought of destroying Angelique by reviving Roxanne, but, for reasons too silly to explain, they’ve decided they want to keep Angelique around. So now Barnabas has decreed that they will manipulate Roxanne’s condition to slow Angelique down. They have taken her from Stokes’ place and put her on a table in Will’s basement, somewhere away from the coffin. They have connected her to a lot of mad science equipment that is supposed to act on the “life force.” Longtime viewers know all about this equipment, because Julia had it in 1968 when she was building a Frankenstein’s monster as part of a project to cure Barnabas of vampirism.
Julia runs the equipment. Roxanne’s condition does not change. Julia tells Barnabas that Angelique is expecting her back at the great house. In her absence, Barnabas takes Roxanne’s hand and stares at her. She opens her eyes and sits up. In the great house, Angelique weakens and collapses.
Many fans wonder where Julia could have got the “life force” equipment. In her own universe, she is a medical doctor and the head of a private hospital, so she could order anything she needed from a medical supply house. Here, her only identity is her imposture as Hoffman the housekeeper, who did not have a prescription pad.
I don’t see why people are so concerned with this. In 1968, the equipment originally belonged, not to Julia, but to another mad scientist, Dr Eric Lang. Barnabas and Julia simply stole it from Dr Lang’s house after he died. In this continuity, we haven’t heard about Dr Lang, but we hadn’t heard about him in the main continuity either until Barnabas fell into his clutches, at which point he already had all of his equipment. So we can presume Barnabas and Julia just found out when his counterpart would be out of the house and raided the place.
Will’s death marks his final appearance, but John Karlen will be back in a couple of months as Willie Loomis, the version of him we met in the main continuity. He will play other characters later, when the show will be set in other periods.
The whole idea of the supernatural is that what appears to be weak is able to overcome what appears to be strong. So, as far as we can tell the dead are infinitely weaker than the living, yet it is two dead characters, vampire Barnabas Collins and wicked witch Angelique Stokes Collins, who dominate all the living people they interact with today. Even dead characters who barely appear utterly outclass live ones. In the opening sequence, Barnabas and his blood thrall Will Loomis hear the voice of late housekeeper Julia Hoffman. Hoffman’s ghost does not manifest visibly; she is such a subtle presence that Will can’t tell the difference between her and a stray piece of purple cloth. Even so, he is helpless against the dead Hoffman. Only the equally dead Barnabas can talk her into getting out of their way.
As far as we can tell, people have more influence over each other when they are close together than when they are far away, and if one person is going to resuscitate another they have to be in physical contact. But Angelique’s father, a wizard known as Tim, somehow connected her to a girl named Roxanne when Roxanne was in the back room of his apartment and Angelique was sealed up in her tomb, miles away. That unexplained connection drained most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique, allowing Angelique to move among the living and reducing Roxanne to a vegetative state. Roxanne must remain in precisely her current state of debility, or Angelique will die again. Whenever Roxanne regains even a minuscule amount of strength, Angelique collapses. If Roxanne were herself to die, the whole of the “life-force,” including the share which animates Angelique, would vanish. The first and third letters of Roxanne’s name specify what she is to Angelique, the ℞ prescribed for her.
As far as we can tell, the actions we take in our lives have consequences while the actions we do not take have none. But 13 weeks ago Barnabas crossed over into an alternate universe where counterparts of the people he knows are living with the consequences of actions he did not take when he met his universe’s counterpart of Angelique in the 1790s. In his life, Barnabas had an affair with Angelique, then spurned her when he found that the gracious Josette was available to him. In revenge, Angelique turned him into a vampire and brought death and misfortune to many others. In this continuity, Barnabas’ counterpart left Angelique alone, married Josette, lived a quiet life, and died a natural death.
Hoffman’s counterpart in Barnabas’ native universe is as devoted to him as Hoffman was to Angelique. This Julia Hoffman is a medical doctor and a mad scientist. She has crossed over to the current continuity, killed her counterpart, and assumed her identity. She is working with Barnabas against Angelique.
Barnabas and Will take Roxanne from Stokes’ apartment to Will’s house on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas wants to control Angelique by periodically stimulating Roxanne a little, knocking Angelique out each time he does so. His original plan was to revive her altogether, destroying Angelique, but he has decided that if he does this he will have less of a chance of proving that Angelique, not foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins, was responsible for the death of a man called Bruno Hess. As far as we can tell, people who can move around and talk are better able to defend their reputations than are those who are rotting in their graves, but Barnabas seems to think that it is the other way around in Angelique’s case.
Julia has refused to aid Barnabas in this nonsensical scheme, but now that Roxanne is in the house she acquiesces. Before she can get to work, they hear a knock on the front door. Will leaves Julia and Barnabas with Roxanne in the secret room behind the bookcase in the front parlor. Angelique herself is the visitor, asking to see Barnabas. Will tells her that Barnabas is not in and that he won’t be back for some time. She goes to the bookcase and appears to be reaching for the lever that exposes the secret room, but simply takes a book. She sits down to read while she is waiting for Barnabas. Will claims that he has resolved to stop drinking and resume his work as a writer, and that he has to be alone to do so. Angelique can’t think of anything to say to that, so she goes.
Once Angelique has returned to the great house, Quentin’s young cousin Amy Collins comes to her in the drawing room to say that she saw a man scurry across the grounds and climb in through a window, and that a few minutes later she heard a man outside her bedroom door. She could not see the man, but thinks he might be Quentin. Angelique tries to persuade her she did not see what she saw. Amy has given up when Angelique grows faint, the result of what is happening to Roxanne. When Angelique’s head clears, she asks Amy in a very serious tone to repeat exactly what she told her. Any inclination the girl may have had to believe that she was mistaken vanishes with this.
We next see Amy exploring the long-disused west wing of the house. She hears someone moving around among the cobwebs and bric-a-brac. She does not find this person, but does discover the statuette Angelique used as a voodoo doll when she cast the spell that killed Bruno, Bruno’s scarf still tied around its neck.
Julia, masquerading as Hoffman, returns to the great house. Angelique scolds her for neither being at hand when she wanted her nor keeping close enough track of Barnabas to prevent him taking Roxanne away from her father’s apartment. Julia answers the first of these complaints by referring to her other duties. She answers the second by trying to say that another of Angelique’s enemies might have made off with Roxanne. Angelique has no patience with either of these statements.
Will comes to the great house. Amy tells him about the man she saw on the lawn, says that she believes he was Quentin, and shows him the statuette with the scarf around its neck. Regular viewers not only remember Angelique using the statuette to strangle Bruno from afar, but will also remember that her counterpart in the main continuity used the same statuette in the same way to cast a choking spell on her husband Sky Rumson in #955, when Sky was trying to set fire to her (theirs was an imperfect marriage.) But out of that context, there does not appear to be anything sinister about the statuette. That isn’t a flaw in the prop- it’s the whole point. As a supernatural intervention, the voodoo doll is not supposed to look like it could have anything to do with the consequences of the spell it is used to cast.
Will recognizes the statuette as a voodoo doll, as his wife Carolyn had done when Maggie showed it to her the other day. That’s a breach of faith with the audience. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced form of technology is indistinguishable from magic. If the implements of witchcraft are things that could be sent off to the police lab for forensic analysis, they are not sufficiently advanced to stay outside the category of technology, and you are not telling a story about magic at all.
Will retraces Amy’s steps through the west wing, hoping to find Quentin and offer him his support. He makes his way to the tower room. The door opens, and he is startled to see who is entering.
Denise Nickerson was a splendid young actress. When she first joined the cast as Amy Jennings in the main continuity, she was central to the plot for months, and did a great job. We remember those days when she goes to the west wing looking for Quentin. It was Amy Jennings who, on her first night in the great house, entered the west wing and went straight to the room where the ghost of that universe’s version of Quentin was waiting for her. But she has been seen less and less. This is Nickerson’s first appearance in eight weeks, and it is hard to be optimistic that we will see much more of her in the future.
Today we see Willie Loomis, much-put-upon servant of old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, for the first time since #696. We have heard no explanation of where he has been during the year in between. Long before his absence began, in #537, Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman had offered Willie a job at Windcliff, a mental hospital which she controls and where he was once a patient. Maybe he went off to work there.
Willie makes his first entrance today in conversation with Amy Jennings, a child who was herself a patient at Windcliff until she moved to the great house on the estate of Collinwood in #639. Willie knows Amy and expects her to know him, presumably from the time they overlapped on the estate, though perhaps they may have met at the hospital as well. Amy lets Willie in the house, but is in a hurry to go outside. He asks where she is going at such a late hour; she says that she left her bicycle outside and has to put it away before it starts raining.
Next we see Willie, he is on the telephone, making kissing noises. “Oh, oh, well you know, I can’t help it, precious. Oh, I mean your ol’ William, he wants to be with you so bad, but I just gotta wait. Well, sure I’ll hurry, I’ll get back as soon as I can.” Willie has always been much given to referring to himself in the third person, even in his first week on the show, when he was played by James Hall. This is the first time he has called himself “William,” and the first time we have had evidence that there is a woman anywhere in the world who reciprocates his romantic feelings.
Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard enters. Liz had unpleasant dealings with Willie in his early days, and like most other people in and around Collinsport believes that he abducted Maggie Evans,The Nicest Girl in Town, and held her prisoner in May and June of 1967. She is disgusted to see him in her house. He tells her that Barnabas and Julia asked him to come to Collinwood. He says that he went to the Old House on the estate, where Barnabas lives, and that he is not at home. He asks if Julia still lives in the great house; Liz says that she does, but that she isn’t in at the moment. Maggie is the governess at Collinwood now, and is in the minority of Collinsporters who don’t believe Willie was her kidnapper. She doesn’t know what happened to her in that period, since Julia used her magical power of hypnosis to wipe Maggie’s mind clear of the memories of the period to cover up the fact that Barnabas was the guilty party. Nonetheless, she is sure Willie was not to blame, and she considers him a friend. Willie asks to see Maggie, and Liz says that she, also, is out. He tells Liz he is getting married; she could not be less interested.
Liz and Amy meet in the drawing room and confer about Maggie. They have locked her in the room on top of the great house’s tower, because she is opposed to a conspiracy they are involved in. Amy says that she has told their leader about Maggie, and that he is on his way to take care of Maggie. The leader is a shape-shifting monster. Liz says she hopes he won’t come in the form he assumes when he is in his room, because that would involve killing Maggie. They have managed to frame someone else for the murders the monster has already committed, so if he kills Maggie it will reveal that that man is innocent.
Willie overhears the end of this conversation, and Liz and Amy realize he has overheard them. He sneaks up to the tower room to free Maggie. He gets into the room, but Amy closes and locks it, trapping them inside. Amy makes her signature move, looking directly into the camera and smiling at the audience. We hear the monster approaching, and Willie and Maggie clutch at each other.
Denise Nickerson was good at lots of things, especially playing Creepy Little Kid.
It is 8 September 1969, and the ghost of Quentin Collins has rendered the great house of Collinwood uninhabitable. The family, including permanent house guest Julia Hoffman, have been staying at the Old House on the estate while recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is on a trip back in time to 1897, when Quentin was killed and the trouble started. But Julia has received a letter Barnabas wrote to her in September 1897 indicating that, as of that date, his mission was about to end in total failure, and so she decides to take matters into her own hands. First, she must learn exactly how and when Quentin died.
Julia goes to the great house and follows the sound of Quentin’s theme song to the tower room. There, she finds the ghost of maidservant Beth, who was one of Quentin’s many lovers. When Beth is in a shadowy corner, she puts on a ghostly voice and tells Julia that her name would mean nothing to her. As soon as she comes into the light, Julia says that they’ve met several times, and soon she is calling her by name. Along with the fact that, as Beth, Terrayne Crawford is just standing there in the same light as Grayson Hall, with no practical effect whatsoever to suggest ghostliness, this deflates whatever feeling we are supposed to have that we are witnessing an encounter with the supernatural.
Julia insists Beth tell her how Quentin died. When the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah Collins was on the show from June to November 1967, she would often insist on the Ghost Rules and vanish if people put direct questions to her. But Beth just wanders around a little, moans to Quentin that she has no choice but to tell Julia what she wants to know, and starts dishing. Again, they aren’t making ghosts like they used to.
Beth tells Julia that on 10 September 1897, she found out Quentin was going to marry a woman named Angelique. Quentin did not tell her this news himself; he left it to Angelique to do so, making the blow fall all the more heavily. This will remind longtime viewers of #392, when Barnabas could not bring himself to tell his ex-fiancée Josette that he was engaged to Angelique, leaving Angelique to tell Josette herself in #393. Josette waited until #425 to leap to her death from the cliff at Widows’ Hill, but things move faster now. Beth went straight from her conversation with Angelique to her room, where she had a bottle labeled “Poison.”
Sensible shopper that she is, Beth buys her poison in the Generic section of the murder weapon store. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Before she could do away with herself, Beth was interrupted by a knock on the door from twelve year old Jamison Collins. Jamison came in to show her a puzzle he had solved, then saw the bottle. He demanded to know what was going on, and she admitted that she was planning to kill herself because Quentin was going to marry Angelique. He stopped her doing that, but after he left to confront Quentin she took a loaded revolver out of her dresser.
Jamison found Quentin in the drawing room, in Angelique’s arms. Angelique at first dismissed Jamison, saying that his uncle was too busy to speak with him, but Jamison held his ground and insisted on seeing Quentin alone. Quentin obliged, but would answer Jamison’s questions only with airy assertions that he is too young to understand the situation. Jamison is so composed and forceful, and Quentin’s behavior is so flagrantly irresponsible, that we might expect Jamison to ask to be spared lectures on maturity from a man so much more childish than he. Instead, Jamison simply becomes angry and tells Quentin that after what he has done to Beth, he wants nothing more to do with him.
In #767, Jamison had a dream in which Quentin’s ghost said that his death was preceded by three events. The first two events happened shortly after. The third event was that Jamison rejected him. This has now happened, and in the dream Quentin said that once that took place “There was almost no time left for Quentin Collins.” Indeed, shortly after Jamison stalks off Beth shows up with her revolver and shoots Quentin. He staggers from the drawing room and goes upstairs. Since the staircase is made of eleven steps and is eight feet tall, that’s some pretty fancy staggering for a man who has just taken a round to the midsection. Quentin keeps staggering all the way to the tower room, where Beth shoots him a few more times.
We cut back to 1969, where Beth tells Julia she killed herself the day after she killed Quentin. She doesn’t seem to be done talking when Julia excuses herself. Say what you will about Sarah, she always left them wanting more.
Julia finds twelve year old David Collins, Jamison’s grandson, in the drawing room with Quentin’s ghost. Since Barnabas took us back in time with him in #701, we’ve got to know the living Quentin quite well, and he is a charming rascal who has very little in common with the silent, family-annihilating ghost we saw late in 1968. Beth’s story does very little to explain how the one turned into the other. The ghost has been draining the life from David; Julia orders David to come away from him, and he does. David lies down on the couch, and Julia examines him. She finds that he is weak, but resting comfortably.
Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes enters. Quentin’s ghost has vanished. Stokes calls Julia by her first name, something he had not done prior to this episode, and asks after David. She at first says he will be all right, then checks on him again. She cannot find a pulse, and declares him dead. Julia has performed wonders in her work as a medical doctor, but her death pronouncements are so often wrong that this does not give much grounds for alarm. However, we then hear Quentin’s voice laughing maniacally, darkening David’s prospects.
Terrayne Crawford seems to be such a nice person that it distresses me to point out that she was not a very good actress. But in this one, Beth’s lack of supernatural quality and Julia’s bland reaction to her make it seem like writer Gordon Russell and director Lela Swift were conspiring to vent their exasperation with Miss Crawford’s limits. She can play one emotion at a time, so that when Beth is shocked to learn that Quentin is going to marry someone else she is only and entirely Shocked. When Beth is suicidal, she is only and entirely Sad; when she decides to take Quentin’s life instead of her own, she is only and entirely Gleeful; when she tells Julia that her vengeance did not relieve her sorrow over Quentin, we can see that’s true, because she is only and entirely Sorrowful. The result is like looking at a series of wood block cuts illustrating various emotions. It’s all very clear and quite vivid, but there’s no sense of development from one scene to the next. Had Miss Crawford been able to lay one emotion over another and play two or more of them at a time, the grin on Beth’s face when she kills Quentin would have shown us that all the layers of complexity of feeling had finally been stripped away and only hatred was left. That would have been a tremendous climax for the character. But since there was never any such complexity to start with, it’s just another block cut.
Often when I see disappointing performances on Dark Shadows, I think of other actors in the cast and try to imagine what they would have done with the part. Gail Strickland, like Miss Crawford, is a tall, thin woman whose chin juts out on a horizontal line, and she was on the show as doomed schoolteacher Dorcas Trilling for a couple of episodes in May. Dorcas’ role would have been well within Miss Crawford’s competence, and in her long and distinguished career Miss Strickland proved she could do just about anything. So on a day like this, I envision a different, much more nuanced Beth. The episode in my imagination is really stellar, I wish you could see it.
Today, David Henesy plays both his 1897 character Jamison Collins and his 1960s character David Collins. He is not credited for either of those roles, but for Daniel Collins, whom he played when the show was set in the 1790s back in late 1967 and early 1968.
The dramatic date is 28 August 1897. On 23 July, in #803, sorcerer Count Petofi cast a spell on stuffy Edward Collins. Ever since, Edward has believed he was a valet recently separated from the service of the Earl of Hampshire. This led Edward’s brother, the rakish Quentin, to follow the Collinses’ long-established procedure for responding to mental illness and lock him up in the room on top of the tower in the great house of Collinwood.
In #816, broadcast on 11 August 1969 and therefore set on 11 August 1897, Petofi brought something even stranger on Edward’s twelve year old son Jamison. He called the spirit of Jamison’s grandson David to project itself from 1969 and to take possession of Jamison. In 1969, David is deathly ill because Quentin’s ghost had besieged him and everyone else at Collinwood. Now, Jamison too is dying, and in the moments he has been able to speak he has let the living Quentin in on the fact that he will eventually become a family-annihilating ghost.
Wicked witch Angelique has made a bargain with Quentin. She will try to restore Jamison and Edward to their usual selves, and if she succeeds Quentin will marry her. We see her beside Jamison, talking earnestly with him, praying loudly to “the Master of Darkness” to cure him and Edward so that she and Quentin can devote themselves to the service of that supernatural personage. In 1968, when the show was in contemporary dress, Angelique and others used a lot of euphemisms like “Master of Darkness,” but lately the ratings are high enough that the ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices has been letting them say the name “Satan.” I suppose Angelique’s persistence in the former phrasing shows that she’s still devoted to the old time religion.
Satan comes through, and Jamison and Edward are freed. This leads to a bit of awkwardness in each case. Quentin and Edward’s step-niece Charity Trask has lost her personality as the result of another of Petofi’s spells, and is now hosting that of the late Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl and onetime fiancée of Quentin and Edward’s late brother Carl. Charity/ Pansy is exploring the great house when she comes to the locked door of the tower room. She hears Edward inside calling for help. He is still in his valet persona, and he is delighted with her when she promises to get a key and let him out. Edward returns to himself, with no memory of anything that has happened since 23 July, while Charity/ Pansy is away. When she comes back up and opens the door, she finds that he is in a foul mood and that he disapproves of her intensely. She is understandably miffed at his apparent fickleness and ingratitude.
For his part, Jamison’s quite different experience has left him with some memories. He tells Angelique of images that are floating around in his mind. She recognizes them as things associated with Petofi, and is distressed. She tells him he is better off not knowing what they are. Quentin is more distressed when Jamison looks at him and asks why he is trying to kill David Collins. Jamison can’t explain who David Collins is or how he learned that Quentin was trying to kill him, but this does confirm everything Quentin has gathered about his post-mortem destiny.
While Edward comforts Jamison in the study, Quentin and Angelique meet in the drawing room. She asks if he will honor his end of their deal; he says that he will, though he makes abundant protests about his reluctance to do so. Charity/ Pansy eavesdrops at the door. She has decided that she will marry Quentin, and is horrified to hear this conversation.
Edward enters and asks Angelique to excuse him and his brother. She exits, and Edward declares that the first order of business must be to hunt and destroy vampire Barnabas Collins. Quentin is appalled at this. He tries to tell Edward that Petofi is their most immediate threat; after he explains who Petofi is, Edward agrees that they will get around to fighting him at the appropriate time, but he insists that Barnabas is their main concern.
Edward exits, and Charity/ Pansy enters. She tells Quentin that she overheard his conversation with Angelique. She says that he will not marry Angelique. Quentin bitterly responds that he will, and that there is nothing she can do to stop it. At this, Charity/ Pansy picks up a knife and tries to stab Quentin. Quentin holds her at bay, and Edward enters in time to see what is happening and to get Charity/ Pansy off of Quentin. Quentin says that Charity/ Pansy’s condition is further evidence of the need to focus on fighting Petofi, but Edward will not swerve from his determination to concentrate on Barnabas. Moreover, he decides that he will now quiet Charity/ Pansy himself. He sends Quentin out of the room and prepares to give Charity/ Pansy a stern talking-to.
Charity/ Pansy’s attempt to prevent Quentin’s marriage to Angelique by stabbing him is of a piece with her attempt to break up Quentin’s relationship with maidservant Beth in #823/824 by poisoning Beth’s brandy. The original Pansy, whom we saw as a live person in #771, was not exactly nice. She was cold, hard, and cynical, trying to exploit the childlike Carl. But she didn’t seem to be bent towards physical violence. That appears to be Charity’s contribution to the composite being that the two of them now make up.
Before Edward can deliver whatever lecture he had planned to give Charity/ Pansy, she goes into a trance. The live Pansy had done a stage act as a “mentalist” and fortune teller, and was astonished in #771 when she tried to do her act at Collinwood and found herself actually channeling spirits from the great beyond. Now Charity/ Pansy routinely acts as a medium.
Charity/ Pansy announces that something terrible will happen on 10 September. Countdowns don’t usually work as a source of suspense on soaps. They might be all right in a play or a feature film, where we know that there will be a final curtain or a last frame after which the imaginary universe will cease to exist, but so long as the series is scheduled to come on every weekday at 4 PM, we know that there is always going to be room to move any deadline a little further out. Besides, since Dark Shadows was done virtually live to tape, they could rarely predict with any accuracy just how many ticks of the clock it would take to get all the movements made and dialogue spoken before the crisis is supposed to be reached. But “10 September” is in a slightly different category. Quentin explicitly says on screen that today is 28 August, which was indeed the original broadcast date in 1969. And when Edward says that his last memories are of 23 July, he is indeed referencing the original broadcast date of #803. So when Charity/ Pansy says “10 September,” she is committing the show to something in the real world. We may well sit up and take notice.
Charity/ Pansy has a vision of what will happen on that date. She sees Angelique looking at a portrait of Quentin in the drawing room. Red paint is dripping from the figure’s chest into a pool on the floor. That pool is next to a trail of other drops of red. In her mind’s eye, Charity/ Pansy follows the drops into the foyer, up the stairs, and into the tower. There, she sees Angelique opening the door to the tower room and finding Quentin sprawled, a sheet of red plastic, or perhaps construction paper, on his chest. Charity/ Pansy screams and runs out. From the dramatic music and Charity/ Pansy’s agitated reaction, I take it the object lying on Quentin’s chest is meant to suggest blood.
The acting is all very strong today. I was fascinated with Nancy Barrett’s use of her face to highlight Charity/ Pansy’s makeup. She relaxes her jaw muscles slightly more than usual, causing the dark treatment around her eyes to stand out. That in turn creates a visual metaphor labeling Charity/ Pansy a “painted lady.”
My wife, Mrs Acilius, was particularly impressed with Louis Edmonds’ realization of Edward. When the spell breaks and he becomes himself again, Edward is alone in an empty room. He has no dialogue, no props, and no scene partner to work with. Yet he instantly conveys what has happened. Even first time viewers will understand that the obliging servant has now become a stuffy authority figure.
Edward’s towering indignation when Quentin first tells him he was the one who locked him in the tower room gives way instantly when Quentin explains that he was under a delusion at the time. Edmonds executes that transition so smoothly that first time viewers will not notice the oddness of it, but longtime fans who remember the many previous occasions when the Collinses locked each other there as a response to mental illness will chuckle.
One of the prominent features of Edward’s personality is his warm relationship with his children. This sets him apart from the first two characters Louis Edmonds played on the show, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins and haughty overlord Joshua Collins. Edward’s dialogue in his scene alone with Jamison involves several discrete points of information, and it would have been understandable if the affection he displays for Jamison while he getting all of those words across had been either perfunctory or mawkish. But he and David Henesy get the emotions exactly right while also delivering the lines very clearly.
Edward’s preoccupation with Barnabas is a delicious little bit of commentary on the show itself. Dark Shadows‘ ratings, chronically low during its first 42 weeks on the air, perked up when it added Barnabas to the cast in April 1967. That summer, schoolkids curious to see a vampire on daytime TV made it into a hit, and not long after Barnabas became one of the pop culture sensations of the 1960s, instantly recognizable to many millions of people who never watched the show. To this day, people who have heard of Dark Shadows are likely to refer to it as “the vampire soap opera from the 60s.” It was Barnabas who took us with him to 1897, when he traveled back in time in the course of his attempt to rescue David from Quentin’s ghost, and for the first months of the 1897 storyline he was the only character who knew what was at stake for the 1969 version of the Collinses in the events going on around him.
But now Barnabas is on the fringes of the story, and Quentin, Angelique, and Petofi all know about 1969. Edward’s idea that the action has to focus on Barnabas is evidence that he hasn’t been watching the show. Petofi is the principal antagonist now, Quentin the chief protagonist, and Barnabas can be absent for weeks at a time while they and others find all sorts of things to do. This represents, not Barnabas’ failure, but his ultimate success. Before he was introduced, every story revolved around well-meaning governess Vicki, the main character. A soap opera can’t really have a main character. It needs to keep multiple storylines running at once, occasionally intersecting with each other, often running for long periods with little or no interaction. When one person had to be at the center of every development, the result was slow and claustrophobic.
Barnabas blew that confining structure open, because as a vampire his function in the story was not to solve problems, but to create problems for other people to solve. So no matter how much time they spent focusing on him, he always directed our attention towards everyone else. We wondered who would catch on to his secret, who would fall victim to his malign intentions, who would find a way to fight him, etc. When a mad scientist managed to free Barnabas of the effects of the vampire curse, he retained his function as a problem-maker, even when he set out to be a problem solver. Every time he announced that he had a plan, we looked forward to seeing how the rest of the cast would react to that plan’s rapid and catastrophic collapse.
Barnabas is as hapless in 1897 as he has been in every other time period, as witness the fact that he has been exposed as a vampire and driven into hiding. But he isn’t even the show’s Screw-Up-in-Chief now. That title belongs to broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi. In #807, Petofi compelled Magda to review the preceding 22 weeks of the show and admit that she had precipitated every plotline. The first of those was the release of Barnabas into the world of 1897, so that his crimes and misadventures are just a subcategory of hers. Since Magda is played by Grayson Hall, who in her original role of Julia Hoffman is waiting for us in 1969, we can be confident she won’t be coming back to contemporary dress with us, but for the moment she has relegated Barnabas to the status of a secondary character.
In #797, the ghost of Rroma maiden Julianka appeared and placed a curse on her fellow grievous ethnic stereotype, Magda Rákóczi. Julianka blamed Magda for her death, and decreed that everyone Magda loved would die. Today, Magda is trying to prevent Julianka’s curse from taking the life of her desperately ill infant niece Lenore, daughter of her late sister Jenny. Magda goes to Lenore’s crib in company with Lenore’s father, Quentin Collins. Magda and Quentin try to conjure up Julianka’s ghost to plead for Lenore’s life, but instead they get the ghost of another Rroma woman- Jenny.
Jenny assumes physical form. She picks up Lenore and sings the lullaby “All the Pretty Little Horses.” We’ve heard Jenny sing this almost every time she has been on the show. It appears to be the only song she knows. For his part, Quentin has a phonograph and only one record, which he plays obsessively over and over. When they lived together, their home must have been a pretty grim place, playlist-wise.
Jenny lifts Lenore’s illness, and says that if Quentin looks into his heart he will know what he must do to ensure that Lenore has a bright future. She vanishes, and Quentin mutters dismissively at the idea that his heart will be a source of useful information.
Later, Quentin will have a dream while sleeping in the drawing room at the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Jenny visits and tells him that he must have nothing to do with Lenore and that she must grow up far from Collinwood. So far, dream sequences on Dark Shadows have always represented visits from the supernatural, but this one might be an exception. Jenny did say that the information Quentin needed to help Lenore was already in his heart. He is clearly not the stuff of which good fathers are made, and as Jenny explicitly says in the dream no one has ever been happy at Collinwood. So the advice she gives does seem to be correct. Perhaps this is just Quentin’s own knowledge taking a shape he can recognize.
Quentin goes on dreaming that his brother Edward is choking him. He wakes up to find that Edward is in fact choking him. This might seem like a prophetic dream, but it too might just be a natural expression of Quentin’s own unprocessed knowledge. Edward, because of a magic spell not directly connected with today’s events, is under the mistaken impression that he is a valet formerly in the service of the Earl of Hampshire. Quentin has followed the Collinses’ long-established protocol for dealing with mentally ill family members, and locked Edward up in the room on top of the tower in the great house. He knows this makes Edward miserable, and it is reasonable to suppose that he would expect Edward to express anger about it. Strangulation is Quentin’s own preferred method of expressing anger, especially towards members of his immediate family, so it can’t have been hard for him to see that coming.
Edward’s motivation is not as simple as Quentin’s would be if their positions were reversed. The evil Gregory Trask has been visiting Edward in the tower room, and has told him that Quentin is determined to keep him imprisoned in that room forever. He asks him to kill Quentin. Edward apparently has decided to comply.
Earlier in the episode, Edward had been more punctilious about cooperating with Trask. Trask presented him with a document to sign, promising that by signing it he would secure his freedom. Edward read the document, even after Trask very loudly insisted that it was unnecessary to do so. When Edward saw that it involved making Trask guardian of his son, Edward protested that he had no son. Trask said that this did not matter, but Edward would not be moved. Edward later tells Quentin about this encounter.
The tower room is a re-dress of the set used as the bedroom of strange and troubled boy David Collins in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. Today it includes the bed from that set, and we see Edward trying to sleep in it. This is a powerful image for longtime viewers. Louis Edmonds plays Edward in this costume drama segment and David’s father Roger in contemporary dress. Edward is the father of Jamison, who like David Collins is played by David Henesy. Not only has the spell robbed Edward of the memory of Jamison and of his role as a father, it has reduced him to curling up in a bed made for a boy rather than a man.
Roger was, for the first year of Dark Shadows, a spectacularly bad father. He openly hated David and exploited David’s miseries to try to manipulate him into doing his own criminal dirty work. He was indifferent to the family’s name and the fate of its businesses, would go to any lengths to hide from the consequences of his actions, had killed someone, and was an alcoholic. Edward shares none of these shortcomings. On the contrary, he goes to the opposite extreme. He is as brave as Roger is cowardly and tenderly loves his children, Jamison and Nora. But he is also stuffy, name-proud, and money-grubbing. The contrast with Roger shows these failings, not simply as negatives, but as the overgrowth of the virtues that separate Edward from Roger. Though Louis Edmonds and Jerry Lacy are such accomplished comic actors that Edward’s scenes with Trask are funny enough to be worthy of a staging of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, Edward’s loss of his identity as father of Jamison and Nora is a genuine tragedy.
Quentin is fond of Jamison, and once he learns that his children exist he seems to wish them well. Nonetheless, he shares most of the other vices of early Roger. As Edward shows us what Roger might have been had he had stronger moral fiber, Quentin is Roger with his vices magnified by black magic. When Jenny tells Quentin that he must not raise Lenore, longtime viewers remember Roger as he was when first we knew him, and remember how grim David’s future seemed at that time. It was only after well-meaning governess Vicki became the chief adult influence in his life that we could have hopes for David. So we cannot doubt that Jenny is right.
This is the last of 21 episodes of Dark Shadows directed by executive producer Dan Curtis. When Curtis first took the helm in #457, he had no experience as a director, and it showed. But he learned very quickly. This one looks great and the scenes play very smoothly. He would later direct the feature films House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows, as well as six episodes of the 1991 prime time revival of Dark Shadows and many other productions.
The evil Count Petofi, a 150 year old sorcerer, has taken possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins and is wreaking havoc in the great house of Collinwood. Due to Petofi’s spells, Jamison’s father Edward thinks he is a valet recently separated from the service of the Earl of Hampshire. Edward’s brother Quentin tries to explain to him what is actually going on, but Edward merely concludes that he is Quentin’s valet now. When Quentin follows the Collinses’ long-established protocol for dealing with mentally ill family members and locks Edward in the tower room, Edward bangs on the door and protests that he won’t be able to do his job if he is locked up. “And I will do it!” he vows.
Charity Trask, disastrously uptight step-daughter of Quentin and Edward’s sister Judith, falls under Petofi’s influence and is possessed by the spirit of Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye. Pansy was on the show briefly in June. The childlike Carl Collins, brother to Judith, Edward, and Quentin, was engaged to marry Pansy before she was killed by vampire Dirk Wilkins. Pansy and Charity never met; when Carl asked Charity if she had seen Pansy, the scene was staged to make it seem absurd that the two women could exist in the same universe. Now, they exist in the same body.
If Petofi has caused startling changes in Jamison, Edward, and Charity, the change in Quentin is perhaps the most jarring of all. He has been a ghost, a homicidal maniac, a Satanist, a zombie, and a werewolf, but always and everywhere a source of total chaos, who destroys all recognized order and is perfectly at home in the midst of sheer madness. Today, Quentin keeps making earnest attempts to restore everyone to their right minds and reestablish the proper and respectable relations within the household.
First time viewers will immediately catch on that the preteen David Henesy is not the actor who would usually play a 150 year old Hungarian nobleman, and when Nancy Barrett suddenly takes on an East London accent and enters wearing a garish costume and doing a dance with lot of hip shaking and pelvic thrusts, they will know that Charity is turning into someone else. The dialogue in the scenes involving Edward explains what is happening to him. They may not know that Quentin is not supposed to be the defender of the status quo. That information is supplied in two scenes. Charity/ Pansy receives a psychic message from the world beyond telling her that Quentin was involved in the murder of Carl, and she announces this information. Also, Quentin calls for help, and the helper who materializes is his distant cousin, Barnabas Collins the vampire.
At the end of the episode, Barnabas lays hold of Jamison/ Petofi and drags him into the secret passage leading from the drawing room to the west wing. It is usually bad news when a vampire abducts a child and shoves him into a dark space, but David Henesy brings such joy to the role of Jamison/ Petofi that we can hardly doubt that what comes next will be equally fun to watch.
Meanwhile, a painter named Charles Delaware Tate has presented himself. Tate’s first appearance will cause a sinking sensation in longtime viewers; he is played by Roger Davis, a terrible actor who delivers much of his dialogue by shouting while clenching the sphincter muscles in his buttocks, and who routinely assaults the women and children in the cast while on camera. We may have hoped we had seen the last of Mr Davis when his most recent character, Dirk, was destroyed shortly after murdering Pansy. But evidently Pansy’s return in the form of another actress has come at the price of Mr Davis’ return in the guise of another character.
For much of 1968, Mr Davis played a man known variously as Peter Bradford and Jeff Clark. His approach to characterization consisted of shouting “My name is Jeff Clark!” When this technique was played out, he took to shouting “My name is Peter Bradford!” He doesn’t shout today, mercifully. But he does say the name “Charles Delaware Tate” quite a few times.
Today’s story about Tate is potentially interesting. Jamison/ Petofi finds him when he answers the front door. Tate asks to see Jamison Collins; Jamison/ Petofi confirms that despite his appearance, he is indeed the person Tate has come to see. Tate accepts this with a blandness that suggests that he knows he is dealing with a magical personage.
Jamison/ Petofi gives Tate a photograph of Quentin and says that he wants a portrait of him. When Quentin comes to the drawing room and finds Tate sketching, he asks who he is. Again, Quentin adopts a stern tone which suits someone defending the sanctity of private property against an unknown intruder. Tate introduces himself and shows him a handwritten letter which Quentin instantly accepts as the product of his grandmother Edith. He tells Tate that Edith has been dead for some time and that he is not interested in a portrait of himself. Tate says that he has already accepted the commission and the money that Edith sent with it, and so he will rent lodgings in the village of Collinsport and finish the job regardless. Quentin does what viewers have hoped everyone who shared a scene with one of Mr Davis’ characters would do, and throws him out.
The forged letter is a fascinating touch for returning viewers. Petofi made himself welcome as a guest at Collinwood by showing Edward forged papers creating the impression that he shared Edward’s friendship with the Earl of Hampshire. That he has also created papers that Quentin immediately accepts as coming from Edith, who died long before Petofi had any reason to come to Collinwood, suggests that his powers of forgery are very extensive indeed.
Tate not only seems to know that Petofi has magical powers; he also shows an acquaintance with Petofi’s henchman Aristide.* When Tate mentions Aristide, he calls him “Aristeedy,” a sort of pet name with a diminutive suffix. This is probably just a blooper on the part of Mr Davis, but since Petofi is continually telling Aristide how lovely he is and how he is more attractive when he doesn’t speak, it does remind us of the gay subtext that runs through their scenes together. We might suspect that Petofi and Aristide’s sexuality is in one way or another one of the reasons they are connected to Tate.
The script opens all of these questions about Tate. Had he been played by an actor who was capable of depicting depth and highlighting ambiguity, it could have been a lot of fun to speculate about just what their answers might be. In #137, future movie star Frederic Forrest was a featured extra on the dance floor at The Blue Whale tavern; it’s easy to suppose he would have taken a speaking part. So when the show puts Mr Davis in front of us, I like to make the time a little more tolerable by imagining what Forrest might have brought to the role of Tate.
*His name is spelled “Aristede” in the closing credits, but it was “Aristide” in the original scripts.
The evil Gregory Trask coerced lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley into helping him murder his wife, Minerva, so that he could marry wealthy spinster Judith Collins. Now Trask and Evan have conjured up a magical simulacrum of Minerva and caused it to hang around Judith. They claim they can’t see it, which, coupled with some other troubles Judith has had, leads her to believe that she has lost her mind. Trask and Evan strong-arm Judith into signing a paper, Trask locks her up in the tower room, and Evan makes the simulacrum disappear.
Meanwhile, Judith’s brother Quentin is at large. Quentin is a werewolf, and when he returned to human form this morning his face was disfigured. This worked to his advantage. He was in jail at the time, and he was being watched. The sheriff’s deputy had not recognized Quentin’s brother Edward when he came to jail that night, so it isn’t so surprising he doesn’t recognize Quentin, even though he is six foot four, has a distinctive hairdo and prominent mutton chop sideburns, and is wearing the same blue suit with a frock coat that he always wears. It is surprising that Edward doesn’t recognize him either, but this may be the result of a congenital problem the Collinses have. Not only was Quentin himself stumped when the equally identifiable Evan had a similar glob of makeup on his face recently, but Judith fails to recognize Quentin today when he comes to the drawing room. When Judith found him, Quentin was listening to his favorite record and reciting its lyrics in his unaltered voice, and he identified himself to her by name. Still, she couldn’t see it.
Quentin bursts into Evan’s room shortly after he finishes dissolving the simulacrum of Minerva. He sees that Evan’s face is no longer disfigured, and assumes that he used the magical Hand of Count Petofi to restore his appearance. Evan tells him he did not- he can’t explain why his face reverted, it just did so on its own. This does not satisfy Quentin, and it will not satisfy returning viewers. We saw Evan struggle to fix his problem for some time, and when he found himself in a crisis situation he suddenly turned up looking like his old self. So we’ve been in suspense for several days wondering what the explanation would be for his cure, and we are no more inclined to settle for a non-explanation than is Quentin.
Quentin knocks Evan out with a candlestick; the background music is a cue we have previously heard during on-camera murders, leading us to wonder if Evan will survive the blow. Quentin rummages around for a moment and finds the hand. He is looking at it, wondering how to use it to restore his appearance, when a man in a wool cap enters and orders him to surrender the hand at once.
This episode features one of Dark Shadows‘ all-time great goofs. When Evan is casting the spell to dissolve the simulacrum, a black-clad figure dashes past in front of him. A voice can be clearly heard exclaiming “Jesus, Lacy!” Evidently actor Jerry Lacy was in such a hurry to get from one set to another that he didn’t realize he was crossing a live camera.
The principal writer of the first seventeen weeks of Dark Shadows was Art Wallace, who was interested in characters as one another’s reflections. Many of his episodes were structured as diptychs, in which we would alternate between two small groups dealing with similar situations. In the comparison, we would see that people who were in some ways very different from each other or hostile to each other would make the same decisions when faced with the same circumstances.
Wallace left the show in October 1966, never to return, but his interest in mirroring comes up again and again. The current storyline centers on Barnabas Collins, who has traveled back to the year 1897. In the first months of 1969, the ghost of Quentin Collins was persecuting strange and troubled boy David, and it was to rescue David that Barnabas participated in a summoning ritual which, to his surprise, got him unstuck in time and brought him face to face with the living Quentin. It also turned Barnabas back into what he was for 172 years, a vampire.
This story is the inverted image of Dark Shadows‘ first costume drama insert, which ran from November 1967 to March 1968. In that period, well-meaning governess Vicki participated in a summoning ritual because she knew that some supernatural menace posed a mortal threat to David. She did not know who that menace was or in what way he was supernatural, but the audience knew that it was Barnabas the vampire. During the four months of that uncertain and frightening journey into the past, we learned how Barnabas became a vampire and that he could be interesting even if he were not one. Vicki didn’t learn anything, and would eventually be written out of the show.
Early in today’s episode, Barnabas is in the room on top of the tower in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. This room was introduced in the 1790s story as one of the places where Barnabas was hidden. In this period, a mentally ill woman named Jenny Collins is hidden there. Governess Rachel Drummond sneaked into the room because Barnabas’ unwilling associate, ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, read Rachel’s palm and told her she had a deadly enemy who was hiding there, and that if she let that enemy choose the time of their first meeting she would have no chance of survival. Jenny sprang from the room, locked Rachel in it, went to the main part of the house, and set fire to the sheets of the bed in which the stuffy Edward Collins lay sleeping.
Barnabas heard about this from Rachel, who reminds him of his lost love Josette. He knows that Angelique, the wicked witch who turned him into a vampire in the first place, is operating in this period and that she has already targeted Rachel. He knows nothing about Jenny, and so he assumes that Angelique is lurking in the tower room. When he enters it, he opens an armoire and finds a doll’s head. The rest of the doll is not attached and the back of the head is caved in, but the face is undamaged. This is the first suggestion of a mirror, a device in which a face can be seen intact and functional even though it is separated from the rest of the person.
Barnabas calls for Angelique and she appears. Barnabas denounces Angelique’s crimes; Angelique brings up his. She asks what he sees when he looks in the mirror, then remembers that he casts no reflection. Angelique does not mention what we have seen ever since we first met her during the 1790s segment, that the vampire curse made Barnabas into her reflection. Today, for example, she gleefully taunts him with the murders he has committed, including those her curse compelled him to commit. This reminds longtime viewers of #341, when Barnabas pressured his friend Julia Hoffman into helping him kill a man named Dave Woodard and then gleefully taunted her with her new status as a murderer.
Angelique tells Barnabas that he has only to love her and she will cease to be his enemy. She makes it clear that she knows all about the mission that has led him to travel back in time from 1969, and offers to help him accomplish it. She suggests that it is his hatred for her that has led her to treat him and everyone around him so cruelly for so long. She says that she will return his love as abundantly as she has returned his hate. She claims to be his mirror, as we know he has long been hers, and offers to show him a pleasing reflection if he submits to her desires.
Barnabas angrily refuses, and Angelique conjures up an image of his impending destruction in the window. Barnabas will not look into this magic mirror, and when he seizes Angelique she vanishes from his arms.
Quentin is on his guard against Barnabas. In the course of an adorable scene in which Quentin and his twelve year old nephew Jamison pretend to be spies, he sends Jamison to steal something that belongs to Barnabas.
Spy school.
Jamison is leery of the whole thing; he says that Quentin doesn’t know any more about real spycraft than he does, forcing Quentin to admit that he was in fact a spy for the police in Egypt not so long ago. This too will get the attention of longtime viewers. Jamison is played by David Henesy, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s plays David Collins. Jamison and Quentin are in the groundskeeper’s cottage on the estate, which from December 1966 to March 1967 was home to David’s mother Laura Murdoch Collins. Laura often told the story of the Phoenix, usually setting the scene in an unnamed land which, she said in #140, “Some call… Paradise.” But she leans heavily enough on the existing mythology of the Phoenix that she reminds even readers who have never heard of Herodotus of ancient Greece and Egypt. Laura herself turned out to be a supernatural phenomenon consisting of several distinct beings reflecting themselves back to each other.
Quentin decides that Jamison must sneak into Barnabas’ house and bring his cane back to the cottage. After he does so, Quentin casts a spell that causes Jamison to speak with the voice of Ba’al, a title for various gods whose cults are remembered very unfavorably in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Among other grim associations the name of Ba’al brings to the minds of those who adhere to the great monotheistic religions is the practice of child sacrifice among the Phoenicians, a practice that often involved the burning of the body of the sacrificed child. Since “Phoenician” and “Phoenix” sound so much alike,* longtime viewers may well associate Ba’al with Laura.
Quentin has made a voodoo doll of Barnabas. Through Jamison, Ba’al says that only silver will work against Barnabas. Silver is of course used in making mirrors, and the piece of silver Quentin uses to inflict disabling pain on Barnabas is the head of Barnabas’ own cane. So once more Barnabas finds himself oppressed by a reflection, or perhaps by the absence of a reflection.
Barnabas is with Magda when he collapses under the pain Quentin is causing him. They discover that the cane is missing. Magda figures out what is happening, and rushes to the cottage. She confronts Quentin, jeering at his cowardice. Quentin is no man at all. He is using a child as a pawn in a black magic rite, and fighting an enemy using a doll. Magda looks at Quentin’s face and reacts with horror as the image of a skull is superimposed on it. She recognizes this as a sign that he will die soon.
Jamison has scenes with both Quentin and Magda today. David Henesy had such great chemistry with David Selby that it’s no wonder Mr Selby named his son “Jamison,” and Hall’s equally great chemistry with him leads me to suspect that if her son Matthew hadn’t already been born when she joined the show he might have been named for Mr Henesy as well. Hall and Jonathan Frid are always wonderful together, and today’s Barnabas/ Angelique confrontation is the best scene Frid and Lara Parker have shared so far. Angelique’s maniacal intensity has always set an upper bound to how responsive Parker could be to Frid’s performance. She is calm enough today that we see them for the first time really in the same space.
*As well they might- they both come from the ancient Greek Φοίνιξ, an adjective meaning “red.” Herodotus calls the legendary fire creature “red-bird,” and the Greeks named the northern Canaanites after the red dye they bought from them.
Dark Shadows Commentary 