veronica stokes – Dark Shadows Commentary

Special Post: A different- better?- Parallel Time

At the end of March 1070, Dark Shadows left the universe in which the action had been set up to that point. It spent sixteen weeks in another continuity, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.”

The Parallel Time segment has so much good stuff in it that I can’t wish it had been different in any way. But if we could have access both to these eighty episodes as they are and to a version of Dark Shadows streamed from an alternate universe in which the show had a bigger writing staff and a more forgiving production schedule, there are some differences I’d like to see.

After the first two weeks of “Parallel Time,” principal photography began on the feature film House of Dark Shadows. For six weeks after that, most of the actors familiar to longtime viewers were away in Tarrytown, New York while the show kept taping in Manhattan. That had its advantages. Several of those actors had contracts that required them to be cast in a certain number of episodes every month, so that the writing staff had to plan the show out like a jigsaw puzzle. Without them, they were free to feature newer cast members like Elizabeth Eis and Michael Stroka as often as they pleased.

That might have led to a new infusion of life into the show. But in fact, the first two weeks concentrated heavily on the established players, and the less familiar faces were parachuted in abruptly when the old favorites became unavailable. They would disappear as abruptly when the regulars returned to NYC. Worse yet, several characters reappeared for an episode or two after weeks or months unseen and unmentioned. That made the stories so choppy that it was hard to trust that anything would come together in a satisfying resolution.

What is more, they never give us any reason to root for the central relationship between Quentin (David Selby) and Maggie Collins. Quentin is a foul-tempered sourpuss, an unstable man-child whose tantrums are as predictable as they are pointless. Maggie, after initially showing some signs of self-respect, winds up taking his abuse with a dismal meekness. When arch-villainess Angelique tried to break the two of them up, we couldn’t help but notice that she was in fact doing Maggie the biggest possible favor.

Writing my posts about the sixteen weeks of the Parallel Time segment, I found that I kept slipping in bits about how the story might have been shaped differently. Those bits got to be long and distracting. I finally decided that the only way to present them coherently was to write them up in the form of a story bible. I don’t make any great claims for what follows, but I can say that I have found writing it to be a useful exercise for me. Getting all of this out of my system removed an obstacle that was making it hard for me to write my episode commentaries, and I have a much easier time imagining what the writers had to do when they drew up the “flimsies” for the thirteen week cycles on which the show was planned.

Prologue

In the lead-up to Parallel Time, the characters in the original continuity kept going to a room in the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood and finding that there was an invisible barrier in the doorway. They could not pass through the barrier, but they could see and hear what was happening on the other side. It was the room in the other universe where their counterparts were exchanging information about the story that was going on over there. The portrait of the first Mrs Quentin Collins dominated the room, and several of the characters were in the habit of carrying on one-sided conversations with it.

I’d keep that basic format, with a couple of changes. There would be no portrait, because we would be in suspense for the first week of the Parallel Time segment as to who the first Mrs QC was. I’d add a scene where Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes (Thayer David) is investigating the phenomenon and sees his own counterpart, a wizard known as Tim (Thayer David.) This other Stokes has come to the room with his sister Hannah (Paula Laurence) to claim some things that belonged to Stokes’ late daughter, the first Mrs Quentin Collins. They talk about Quentin’s remarriage, and make some obscure remarks about the deceased.

Week One

In the actually existing show, Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) crosses over to the other continuity and takes the audience with him. To his disappointment, his curse has followed him and he is still a vampire there. The first people he meets are Carolyn Loomis (Nancy Barrett,) counterpart of his distant cousin and one-time victim Carolyn Collins Stoddard, and her husband, alcoholic novelist Will (John Karlen,) counterpart of his other-times victim Willie Loomis. The Loomises live in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas bites Carolyn, but Will finds out about him, traps him in his coffin, and tries to use him as a source of material for a new book.

The only change I would make to this part would come after Will has trapped Barnabas. In the actually existing show, Carolyn is still in the house, still under Barnabas’ influence, the whole time Will is forcing him to give an oral history. I would have Will send Carolyn off to a sanitarium a hundred miles north of town. After the “Parallel Time” segment ends, the show mentions a psychiatric facility called Stonecrest; I’ll use that name for it.

Episode 1059: Who will ever light this light?

Sixteen weeks ago Dark Shadows crossed over to a different universe than the one where the first 196 weeks of the action took place. The show insists on calling this segment “Parallel Time.”

The only villain left standing in this next-to-last installment of “Parallel Time” is the evil Tim Stokes, whom we did not see and barely heard of until the tenth week of the segment, and who did not start acting on his own initiative until the last few days. Thayer David does a great job playing Stokes, and the character evokes his earlier parts in interesting ways. But he is obviously a last-minute addition meant to keep the story going while they take care of some loose ends they were in too much of a hurry to tie up in a natural way.

Desperate to get vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman out of Parallel Time, writer Gordon Russell resorts to what Roger Ebert used to call an “Idiot Plot,” a series of events that can take place if and only if every character is dumber than any member of the audience.

Barnabas has fallen in love with and bitten a non-character named Roxanne, who, in lieu of a personality, has psychic powers. Yesterday Barnabas gave Roxanne a scarf that belonged to Julia’s counterpart in this universe, and Roxanne told him its owner was dead. Only today, when Maggie speaks the name of that other Julia Hoffman with revulsion, does Barnabas remember that there are two of them, and that the scarf belonged to the one whom he already knew to be dead.

Barnabas and Roxanne know that Stokes is on the loose and that he has vowed to take revenge on everyone. So she walks home alone, and finds Stokes waiting for her there. He finds Barnabas’ bite marks on her neck, and realizes that he is a vampire. Stokes decides he must lock Roxanne up. A man of his evil ways must know of any number of places where he could lock Roxanne up, many of which would take Barnabas a long time to find, but he choose to stick her in her closet. Minutes after his departure, Barnabas comes to the house and lets her out.

Barnabas takes Roxanne back to the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, where Maggie has the suitcase Julia brought with her when she came to this universe five weeks ago. Roxanne takes a piece of costume jewelry and confirms that its owner is alive. She leads them to the basement of the great house on the estate. They hear Julia weeping in the dungeon behind a bookcase where Angelique trapped her a few days before her own destruction. This weeping sound will bring back memories for longtime viewers. In the first months of the show, several characters heard the sound of a woman weeping behind a wall in the basement of the great house, a sound strongly implied to be of ghostly origin. They eventually gave that sound an explanation that was neither supernatural nor consistent with what we had seen up to that point, and then never mentioned it again. But it’s good to be reminded of it regardless.

Barnabas, Roxanne, and Maggie eventually find Julia and take her back to the Old House, where they give her a large brandy. Barnabas, Maggie, and Julia then go to the police station, leaving Roxanne alone in the house so that Stokes can get at her. She threatens him with a dagger, and he withdraws. Maggie then goes from the police station to the great house by herself so that Stokes can grab her.

A joyous reunion. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 1037: An uncertain and frightening journey

In November 1967, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters participated in a séance. She came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. For the next four months, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. Viewers made the acquaintance of wicked witch Angelique and learned how old world gentleman Barnabas Collins first became a vampire.

Vicki herself learned nothing from her trip back in time. She spent the first part of it telling the actors about the parts they had played in the first 73 weeks of the show. After that incredibly stupid habit had burned away any goodwill the audience had for the character, Angelique framed Vicki for her own acts of sorcery. Vicki at first refused to take these charges seriously, an inexplicable response given both her knowledge of the period in which she found herself and her extensive experience with the supernatural in her own time, then kept looking for the most idiotic possible means of defending herself until she was sent to the gallows. In the nick of time, she was whisked back to the séance and to the 1960s, rope burns already visible on her neck. Vicki never regained the audience’s sympathy, and was written out later that year. Maggie Evans succeeded Vicki both as governess at Collinwood and as the perpetually imperiled heroine.

Now Barnabas has traveled in time, not backward, but sideways. He is in an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” Here, Maggie’s counterpart is married to foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins, the master of Collinwood. Angelique’s counterpart is Quentin’s late first wife, returned from the grave and scheming to get Maggie out of the way so that she can remarry her widower. Angelique casts a spell today that leads Quentin to confront Maggie and announce that he is certain that she is a witch.

The 1790s segment was in some ways one of the show’s greatest triumphs, but nothing about Vicki’s part in it was very good. So seeing this Angelique reenact the story that culminated in the witchcraft trial will bring a sinking feeling to longtime viewers. It doesn’t help that Maggie has made a number of inexplicably foolish decisions and quailed in the face of opposition she would seem to be able to overcome easily.

Moreover, Quentin is such a miserable husband to Maggie that we have no rooting interest in their marriage. He is being relatively nice to her at the beginning of the episode, because she was just abducted and imprisoned by a madman, and he feels vaguely guilty that he had jumped to the conclusion that she left voluntarily and berated everyone who suggested she might be in trouble. But even in those nice moments he maintains a paternalistic, condescending tone towards Maggie. When she wonders aloud what other crimes her abductor might have committed, he insists that there could not have been any others and becomes exasperated with her for raising the topic. That led my wife to yell at the screen “Quentin, you are the worst husband! There may be others who are also the worst, but you are the worst!”

Quentin pets Maggie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Quentin so quickly flips from acting like he is indulging the moods of his silly child-bride to accusing Maggie of witchcraft, he not only confirms Mrs Acilius’ assessment that he is “the worst.” Coming so shortly after the abduction story, he seems to be a man blaming his wife for being raped. Indeed, the man who abducted her had in #1022 and #1023 jumped her and sexually assaulted her in a dark alley, and she explained her decision to keep quiet about that attack by saying she was afraid Quentin would blame her. This is an important theme, but it would be a tricky one to explore on a show about witches and vampires and time travel and parallel universes where the median viewer is about ten years old.

Perhaps it would have been possible to have another take on the themes of the 1790s segment that would not have led us to this particular dead end. I think of a comment left in 2017 on Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day:

You know, [Parallel Time] might have had a very different feel with the following changes:

Alexandra [Moltke Isles] takes the role of Quentin’s evil first wife, Victoria Stokes Collins. There is no nice twin. She dabbles in “the black arts” but is not a full-on witch. She and Quentin have a son, David.

Lara Parker takes the role of Quentin’s new wife, Angelique “Angela” Evans. She’s kind-hearted and traditional and a romantic. She has no witchcraft powers. But not quite the pushover as time goes on.

And Kathryn Leigh Scott plays Margaret “Maggie” Evans still, but she’s now Angela’s sister and Cyrus’ lab assistant. She’s a modern woman — middle class, educated, confident, reluctant in matter of love.

Maggie and Angela are different — Maggie is the more confident, assertive, cynical of the two — but they are close and both “good” girls. Maggie doesn’t like Quentin.

Lisa Richards is looking for other work.

So in this version, there was a seance two years ago but instead of a murder, Victoria just simply vanished when the lights went out. They never learned what happened. There is no portrait. No one mentions her by name.

When Barnabas enters parallel time, Quentin has just brought Angela home, with Roger and Hoffman treating her like crap.

After about two weeks of establishing all these new relationships, they recreate the seance.

The lights go out, and when they come back on, there’s Victoria in clothing from the late 1700s. She has no memory of what happened — and doesn’t really care. She wants her rightful place as mistress of Collinwood back. (Explanation for her vanishing and returning: Daddy Stokes playing with I-Ching wands. Victoria kills her father when she learns he did that).

Can you imagine the shock for the audience to have “Vicky” just show up like that? And in the same manner RT Vicky did. And then to be evil?

That really could have been fun.

Comment left 29 July 2017 by “William” on “Episode 1056: The Parallel Sky,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day.

I like this idea very much. When she played Angelique’s identical twin Alexis, Lara Parker created a character who was not murderous, but far from a naif, and it is easy to imagine that a person like that would have stood up well enough to the kind of stresses that the wicked witch would bring against her to keep the drama going for some time. And it would be a nice inversion, not only to see the evil Vicki persecuting the innocent Angelique, but also to have his unresolved feelings for Vicki render the time traveler Barnabas as clueless in the evil Vicki’s proper world as the well-meaning Vicki was in Barnabas’ native time.

Moreover, these last two weeks the barrier between the universes has been getting leaky. So when the evil Vicki is finally thwarted here, she might escape into the original continuity and wreak havoc there. That would pick up on a road not taken in #872, when sorcerer Count Petofi escaped from the year 1897 and made his way to the Collinwood of the present day, only to be snatched back to the past after a few minutes.

I can’t wish that all of “William’s” dreams had come true. I like Lisa Blake Richards, so I’d want to leave her in the Jekyll and Hyde story and come up with another storyline to feature Kathryn Leigh Scott, either as Maggie or as another character. And it is a gift to viewers who have been with the show from the beginning that David Henesy’s character in Parallel Time is called Daniel Collins rather than David Collins, the name of his part in the other continuity, since the point was made in #153 and referenced later that David’s name was the result of events that wouldn’t have happened here. And while the séance gimmick is too good not to do, I would still like to see Mrs Isles play twins- the evil Victoria and her non-evil sister Veronica.*

*Mrs Acilius doesn’t like the name “Veronica” for this character. She’d rather call her Vanessa or Vivian.

Episode 1056: The Parallel Sky

I praise another commenter’s suggestion that 1970 Parallel Time (the segment I call “Meet Another Angelique”) would have been better with Alexandra Isles as an evil version of Vicki and Lara Parker as her innocent victim, the second Mrs Quentin Collins. That would make it an inversion of the 1795 storyline (which I call “Meet Angelique.”)

Episode 1056: The Parallel Sky