Tag: werewolf

Episode 809: Back from your evening revels

Charity Trask finds Quentin Collins unconscious and disheveled in the woods. She kneels beside him in a show of concern, then notices a woman on the ground near him. The woman’s face is covered with what on a black and white television look like slash marks and her clothing is badly torn. She regains consciousness just long enough to say Quentin’s name. Charity notices that Quentin is holding a scrap of cloth that matches the woman’s dress, and realizes that he is the werewolf who has been terrorizing the area.

Quentin comes to, and Charity tells him they must get help for the injured woman. Quentin’s response is to threaten to kill Charity if she says anything to anyone about what she has seen. He says that he will look after the woman, and repeats his death threats to Charity.

Charity goes home to the great house of Collinwood, where her father, the overbearingly evil Gregory Trask, orders her to marry Quentin by the end of the week. She is horrified and tells him she will not. She cannot explain why. Before Gregory can corner Charity and force her to give him information, twelve year old Jamison Collins enters. Jamison reports seeing the injured woman in the woods, and says that Gregory must go to her at once if she is to survive. Gregory dismisses this as a “tall tale” and says he will not be distracted from punishing Jamison for his long unexplained absence from the house. Charity, on the point of sobbing, urges Trask to take Jamison seriously, and he reluctantly goes to see if there really is a woman in the woods.

We know more than do Charity or Trask. We saw Jamison meet Quentin in the woods next to the woman’s body, and talk to him in an amiable and condescending tone about the possibility of turning this unfortunate incident to their mutual advantage. He also makes it clear that, despite his appearance, he is not simply Jamison. He is a sorcerer named Count Petofi, in possession of Jamison and acting through his body. When Charity asks Jamison/ Petofi if the woman was alone when he found her, he replies that of course she was. Smiling, he asks who she thought he might have seen. Terribly agitated, she soon excuses herself and goes into the foyer. Jamison/ Petofi looks directly into the camera and smiles. David Henesy was the first actor on Dark Shadows to use this technique, back in 1966 when he was playing strange and troubled boy David Collins. He’s been doing it a lot lately, and is still very good at using it to unsettle the audience.

He looks young for 150, but he’s grown quite a bit since 1966. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin comes down the staircase, wearing a tidy new suit. Charity is shocked that he did nothing to help the injured woman; he resumes his menacing tone and demands to know whether she kept her side of the bargain. He eventually deduces that she did not tell what she saw, and allows her to go upstairs to her bedroom. Quentin is usually charming, often funny, and occasionally aligned with good against evil, but even before he became a monster he was established as a homicidal maniac. When we first met Quentin, he was a ghost haunting Collinwood in the late 1960s and he kept killing people there. The first week of our trip back in time to 1897, we saw him trying to strangle his grandmother in her bed. And his sister-in-law turned him into a werewolf as revenge after he murdered his wife Jenny. Since we are focused on the horror of Charity’s situation as her father is pressuring her to marry Quentin, of course his bloodthirstiness is the aspect of his personality we see most clearly today.

Trask returns, carrying the injured woman. Quentin asks if she was conscious. Trask says she is not conscious. Quentin specifies that he wants to know if she has been conscious at any point while with Trask. This arouses Trask’s suspicions; Quentin protests that it is information he will need when he telephones the doctor. Trask says that she was not, and carries her upstairs.

Quentin goes to the drawing room. Jamison/ Petofi is there, and has some business to discuss. Quentin is too unsettled by the fact of the possession to talk candidly. Jamison/ Petofi decides to humor him. “I’ll become that beautiful child you so want to see… Can we play a game, Uncle Quentin?” Quentin is stunned by Jamison/ Petofi’s sudden change of tone and bearing. It is indeed impressive to see David Henesy drop his mimicry of Thayer David as Petofi and resume his usual approach to the role of Jamison. We’d forgotten just how deeply he had come to inhabit that imitation.

Jamison/ Petofi declares that they will have a treasure hunt. He gives Quentin a series of clues in the form of cryptic rhymes. Quentin is completely stumped by all of them. Finally Jamison/ Petofi just points at the desk drawer he wants Quentin to open and tells him there is a document in it that he can use against Trask. Quentin opens the drawer and pulls out heap after heap of paper, then declares “There’s no paper here!”

Quentin is not especially brainy; much of his appeal comes from the joy David Selby, Ph.D., took in playing a character who at no point says or does anything to demonstrate intellectual prowess. But we are not supposed to believe that he is stupid, at least not so stupid that it is plausible that “There’s no paper here!” was the scripted line. Maybe it was a blooper for “There’s no paper like that here!” or “There’s no paper here I haven’t seen before!” or something like that.

A document bearing a wax seal and a couple of signatures materializes on top of the papers Quentin has pulled out of the desk. He reads it, and sees that it is a full confession to the murder of Trask’s first wife, signed by Trask and lawyer Evan Hanley. All Jamison/ Petofi has to say is “It can be very useful, can’t it? Especially since it’s true… Aren’t games fun, Uncle Quentin?” and Quentin catches on that the document gives him power he can use against Trask.

Meanwhile, the injured woman has briefly regained consciousness in the upstairs bedroom where Trask and Charity are attending her. She spoke Quentin’s name, and Trask sent Charity to fetch him. Trask confronts Quentin about this. Quentin says that the woman’s name is Tessie, that he talked to her a couple of times when they ran into each other at the Blue Whale tavern, and that he knows nothing more about her. He admits he didn’t call the police after he called the doctor; he claims he simply forgot, in the confusion of the moment. Trask says that he will go and make the call. In an accusing tone, he asks “Most unfortunate, isn’t it, that you were the one who forgot?” He leaves Quentin alone with Tessie.

Tessie regains consciousness, looks at Quentin, and reacts with dismay. He tells her he didn’t mean to do it. She moans and dies. As she flops over, her right breast comes perilously close to springing out of her décolletage. When he realizes she has died, Quentin says “Tessie!” with a note of exasperation, as if she’s always doing inconvenient things like that. Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud.

Downstairs, we see that Trask did not call the police after all. Charity is doing it from the telephone in the drawing room. Quentin enters through the secret panel behind her. We first saw him use this panel in #685, when it was 1969 and he was a silent but peculiarly corporeal ghost. He let himself into the drawing room and strangled silversmith Ezra Braithwaite, played by Abe Vigoda. A bit of an eldritch moment that the killer of Tessie is also the killer of a character played by the actor who would go on to play Tessio in the 1972 film The Godfather.

In Vigoda’s last scene in that movie, Tessio and Corleone Family consigliere Tom Hagen are at pains to assure each other that Tessio’s impending murder and the events that led up to it were strictly business, and that Tessio and his murderers still have the warmest regards for each other. Quentin’s attempt to deny his guilt to Tessie is of that same sort- he didn’t have any hostility towards her, his nature as a werewolf simply required that he kill the nearest person.

By contrast, Quentin’s interaction with Charity is intensely personal and intensely unpleasant. He takes the telephone out of her hand, something that men often do to women on Dark Shadows when they are trapping them, and moves deep into her personal space as he demands to know why she would want to call the police. She tells him her father ordered her to make the call; he says that Tessie will tell the police nothing now, because she is dead. Charity shouts that he killed Tessie, and that she will tell everything.

Danny Horn devotes much of his post about the episode at his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day to the absurdity of Quentin making a date with Tessie on a night when the Moon was full. In a comment, I pointed out that we have no reason to think he did make a date with her:

I don’t think it’s so hard to explain why Tessie was in the woods at dawn, though it does require a little fanfic.

Charity was in Quentin’s room in 806, inviting him to go for a walk on the beach when he’s busy getting drunk and listening to the same dreary little waltz over and over. To get Tessie into the woods, all we have to do is assume that shortly after that scene Quentin ran out of booze before he was drunk enough to stop caring about the upcoming full moon. Not wanting to deal with the Trasks, he didn’t go to the mansion’s liquor pantry, but staggered down to the Blue Whale.

There, Quentin met Tessie. She was upset with him for missing several dates in the last few days. He can’t very well explain what he’s been doing lately, and his refusal to answer Tessie’s questions angers her. She’s about to give Quentin a piece of her mind when he realizes that it will be dark soon, and rushes from the bar.

Now Tessie is really furious. She follows Quentin to the estate. Once there, she sees him change into the werewolf, and hides in terror for most of the night. Shortly before dawn, she thinks he is gone and leaves her hiding place. The werewolf appears and slashes away at her for a few minutes before changing back into human form and collapsing beside her.

And that’s when Charity finally takes her walk, and finds out.

Comment left 17 November 2020 by “Acilius” on Danny Horn, “Episode 808: Twice Burned,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 18 January 2016

Tessie is played by Deborah Loomis, and is the earliest screen credit on her IMDb page. Her next role listed there was in Hercules in New York, a 1970 film which also featured fellow Dark Shadows day player Erica Fitz Mears, who appeared in #594 and #595 as Leona Eltridge. Neither Miss Loomis nor Mrs Mears stuck with acting after the middle of the 1970s, but the two top billed members of the cast worked steadily for some years after. The first name in the credits was comedian Arnold Stang, who was best known at the time for a series of TV commercials for window screens ending with the tag “Arnold Stang says don’t get stung!” Second billed was Arnold Strong, a bodybuilder from Austria making his acting debut. Under his birth name of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arnold Strong would go on to roles in several later films. I know of no evidence he ever auditioned for a part on Dark Shadows.

Episode 808: The mysterious shadow he can cast

Sorceror Count Petofi has taken possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins. He has also cast a spell on broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, compelling her to lead him and his henchman Aristide to the hiding place of vampire Barnabas Collins.

Magda, Jamison/ Petofi, and Aristide. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Jamison/ Petofi and Aristide are ready to drive a stake through Barnabas’ heart. They open his coffin and find that he is away from home today. Magda does not know where his other hiding place is. Jamison/ Petofi becomes intrigued with Barnabas and decides to search through Magda’s home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, for papers that might give him information about Barnabas.

He and Aristide find a book published in 1965. Since the dramatic date is currently 1897, this seems to be a matter of some interest. Jamison/ Petofi calls for Magda, who tells him that Barnabas told her that the book had been brought back in time from the 1960s by “a girl named Vicki.” Barnabas’ utterance of the name “Vicki” in #797 was the first reference to well-meaning governess Victoria Winters in the 1897 segment, and this is the second. Vicki was the main character of the show for its first year, and remained in the cast for over a year after that. That the name “Vicki” would be heard only in rare and trivial echoes is not something longtime viewers would likely have predicted before she was written out of the show last year.

Magda goes on to explain that Barnabas himself traveled back in time from 1969. She has a vague idea that he was trying to save a dying child, and hasn’t the faintest clue how he made this remarkable journey. Jamison/ Petofi says that they will get the rest of the story from Barnabas himself. He also says that if he can travel in time, he will be able to live forever, a proposition which would seem to require further explanation.

Jamison/ Petofi is satisfied Magda is telling them everything she knows, but Aristide keeps making threats. The most intriguing refers to something Petofi might do to her: “You’ve heard of his powers. Hasn’t anyone in your tribe ever told you about the mysterious shadow he can cast? The shadow that isn’t your own that follows you?” Writer Sam Hall was probably familiar with a novel called Phantastes by George MacDonald, a bestseller of the nineteenth century that was influential among English fantasy writers of the first half of the twentieth century. It tells of a character named Anodos, who is tormented by a malicious shadow that moves by itself and won’t leave him alone. So perhaps Hall is planning to mine MacDonald’s works for an upcoming story.

Meanwhile, in the great house on the estate, Charity Trask has a dream. She sees Jamison/ Petofi with a portrait of rakish libertine Quentin Collins. The portrait is identical to the one she saw turn into a picture of a werewolf the night before, and she asks Jamison/ Petofi if he saw the same thing. He laughs, then tells her Quentin is a lost soul.

Quentin shows up. Charity’s father, the evil Gregory Trask, has directed her to marry Quentin, and she has set out to comply with this command. Quentin has never shown the slightest interest in her in their time awake together, and he isn’t much friendlier in this dream. He asks her to do something to lighten his mood. “Can’t you be happy? Can’t you be gay?  Don’t you want to make me happy?” We’ve never seen her happy; as Gregory’s daughter, it’s hard to see how she could be. She has probably never tried to be gay, either, but it would have to be better than marrying Quentin. She does try to make him happy by imitating Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye, whom she never met or saw or heard, but whose spirit has been possessing her off and on for several days now. She sings Pansy’s theme song and does the highly suggestive dance that goes with it, only to find that Quentin has vanished.

Charity turns and finds Quentin embracing and kissing another girl. They are laughing. Quentin tells Charity that, as she can see, she has succeeded in cheering him up, and therefore she should run along. He and the girl then disappear and Magda enters. Magda tells Charity that she should forget Quentin, because he has a terrible secret. She leaves, and Quentin and the other woman reappear, still laughing at Charity.

Charity decides to ask Magda to explain the dream. Before she reaches the Old House, she finds Quentin and the girl from the dream lying on the ground in the woods. Quentin’s clothing is torn and he is unconscious, but he does not appear to be injured. The girl’s face is covered with what in black and white look like slash marks, but in color are obviously purple makeup. She opens her eyes and gasps Quentin’s name. Whether she was calling for Quentin because he was with her when they were attacked or crying out because he is the one who attacked her would not be clear to first time viewers, though returning viewers know that Quentin is a werewolf and will assume he was the attacker.

Episode 807: An award-winning performance, wouldn’t you say?

From #1 to #274, each episode of Dark Shadows began with a voiceover narration by Alexandra Moltke Isles, usually in character as well-meaning governess Vicki. This identified Vicki with our point of view and suggested that she would sooner or later learn everything we knew.

Jonathan Frid joined the cast as vampire Barnabas Collins in #211, and quickly became the show’s great breakout star. If the upright Vicki found out what we knew about Barnabas, one of them would have to be destroyed. Vicki was the favorite of longtime viewers and Barnabas was attracting new ones, so that was out of the question. Therefore, other members of the cast started taking turns reading the voiceovers, and doing so not as their characters, but in the role of External Narrator.

Today marks the first time Frid himself reads the narration. His training first in Canada, then at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and later at Yale School of Drama prepared Frid well in the art of dramatic reading, and in later years he would concentrate on that aspect of his craft. Several of his colleagues are his equals in these voiceovers- I would particularly mention Kathryn Leigh Scott, whose conception of The Narrator is always arresting, and Thayer David, who could consistently achieve the most difficult of all effects in voice acting, a perfectly simple reading. So I can’t say I wish Frid had done all of them, but he is always good, and today’s performance is among his most gorgeous.

The action opens on a set known to longtime viewers as the Evans cottage, where from 1966 to 1968 artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie served as Dark Shadows‘ principal representatives of the working class of the village of Collinsport. In those days, it was on this set that we saw how the misdeeds of the ancient and esteemed Collins family had consequences that spilled out of the estate of Collinwood and warped the lives of people trying to make a more or less honest living nearby.

Now the dramatic date is 1897, and Sam hasn’t been born yet. But the cottage is already an artist’s studio. It is temporarily occupied by the nationally famous Charles Delaware Tate, who is painting a portrait of rakish libertine Quentin Collins at the behest of evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Charity Trask, a resident of the great house of Collinwood, is visiting Tate in the cottage when she sees the face in the portrait change from that of Quentin. It takes on a great deal of fur and long fangs, and reminds Charity of a wolf.

By the time Tate looks at the painting again, it has resumed its normal appearance. He tells Charity that the transformation must have been in her imagination. She is willing to consider the possibility, but we know better. Quentin is a werewolf, a condition Petofi knows how to cure. Portraits on Dark Shadows have had supernatural qualities at least since #70, including portraits we saw Sam execute on this set in 1966, 1967, and 1968, and the show has borrowed from The Picture of Dorian Gray before. Moreover, Tate’s reaction to Charity is one of barely controlled panic. Nancy Barrett has to ramp up Charity’s own emotional distress to the limit to make it plausible she would not notice Tate’s extreme agitation. Perhaps if Tate were played by a better actor than the ever-disappointing Roger Davis, his response might have been ambiguous enough that Miss Barrett could keep the tone a bit lower, but his unequivocal display of alarm leaves her nowhere to go but over the top.

Mr Davis was under no obligation to play the scene transparently, since Tate later goes to Petofi’s henchman Aristide and lays out in so many words his precise relationship to Petofi’s operations and his knowledge of them. Tate’s career is his reward for selling his soul to Petofi, and he has already experienced great sorrow as a result of that bargain. Tate knows that the portrait changed to reflect the full Moon’s influence on Quentin and that Petofi is currently in possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins. Aristide tells us that Petofi’s own body is in suspended animation while he acts through Jamison. He also says that it was in 1797 that Petofi’s right hand was cut off, and that if he does not reclaim the hand in a few weeks, by the date of the one hundredth anniversary of the amputation, he will die and so will Tate.

Jamison/ Petofi is in the prison cell in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas has traveled back in time from the 1960s with some vaguely good intentions and is hanging around 1897 causing one disaster after another. Now, he is doing battle with Petofi and has locked him, in the form of Jamison, in the cell. Barnabas’ reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, guards Jamison/ Petofi during the day. Early in the episode, Jamison/ Petofi calls Magda and pleads with her to release him. He tells her that he is “just a little boy” and that she is a “rather heartless creature.” She says she wishes he were a little boy again, but that she isn’t stupid and he won’t fool her. Indeed, the phrase “rather heartless creature” and Jamison/ Petofi’s manner in delivering it sound so much like Thayer David as Petofi that they hardly count as an attempt to deceive Magda.

Later, Jamison/ Petofi casts a spell to summon Aristide, then calls to Magda again. When Magda arrives, Jamison/ Petofi gives himself a better script than the one from which he had acted in his previous scene with her. He pretends not to remember how he got into the cell and to be shocked that Magda knows he is there. Perhaps the utter transparency of his earlier pleadings was an attempt to get Magda to underestimate his abilities as a trickster.

In #803, we saw that when Petofi took possession of him Jamison’s right hand disappeared from his wrist, matching Petofi’s own mutilated condition. When Jamison/ Petofi feigns the amnesia that might come upon recovery from possession, we might therefore expect Magda to demand that he remove his gloves to prove that he is himself again. But he plays the part of Jamison so convincingly that we are not really surprised he does fool Magda. She goes into the cell, embraces Jamison/ Petofi, and he kisses her on the cheek. It is this kiss that spreads his magical power, and she realizes too late that she has been had.

Aristide arrives a moment later, and Jamison/ Petofi calls his portrayal of an innocent boy “an award-winning performance.” Indeed, if there had been daytime Emmys in 1969, David Henesy might have won one for his portrayal of Thayer David playing Petofi playing Jamison.

Aristide wants to kill Magda; Jamison/ Petofi forbids this. Under his power, she announces that she is responsible for all the evil that has happened in 1897. She was responsible for releasing Barnabas and therefore for all the murders and other harm he has done; she made Quentin a werewolf, and is to blame for his killings in his lupine form and for the curse his descendants will inherit; she stole Petofi’s severed hand and is at fault for the deaths of Rroma maiden Julianka and of her own husband Sandor that resulted from the hand’s presence. She even takes the blame for Quentin’s murder of her sister Jenny, the act for which the werewolf curse was meant as vengeance. Magda says she must be punished. Jamison/ Petofi tells her that he is not interested in punishing her. He has another use in mind for Magda She will lead him and Aristide to Barnabas’ coffin today, and they will destroy him.

Longtime viewers will perk up twice when Aristide says that Petofi lost his hand in 1797 and that he has exactly one hundred years to recover it. From December 1966 to March 1967, Dark Shadows’ first supernatural menace was undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who at intervals of exactly one hundred years incinerated herself and a young son of hers, who was always named David, in an unholy ceremony that renewed her existence, but not that of the Davids. Since the usual laws of nature don’t apply, the show needs some other causal mechanism to create suspense, and anniversaries will do as well as anything else. Another iteration of Laura was on earlier in the 1897 segment. It was fun to see her again, but they could shoehorn her into that year only by retconning away the one hundred year pattern in her immolations. It’s reassuring in a way to see that Petofi is bringing centenaries back.

The date 1797 is also significant. It was in 1796 that Barnabas died and became a vampire. We flashed back to that period for the show’s first costume drama segment in November 1967 to March 1968, and Barnabas went back to 1796 for a week in January 1969. So we may go back again some day, and if Petofi was alive and in his prime in 1797, we might run into him there.

Barnabas and Petofi are not the only characters from the 1790s who might be on the minds of attentive longtime viewers. Barnabas’ little sister Sarah died in 1796, and as a ghost was an extremely important part of the show from June to November 1967. We’ve been getting reminders of Sarah for the last several days. In #792 wicked witch Angelique produced a toy soldier of Barnabas’ that Sarah gave to strange and troubled boy David in #331. In #805, Charity found Sarah’s recorder, a prop that often served as Sarah’s calling card in 1967, and talked about learning to play it. And today, we see a portrait standing on the floor of the Evans cottage, a set which Sarah visited in #260, depicting a girl wearing a bonnet very much like the one Sarah wore as a ghost in 1967 and a pink dress just like the one she wore when we saw her as a living being in the flashback to the 1790s.

Portrait at the cottage.

I wonder if, when they were making up the flimsies for this part of the show, they had thought of reintroducing Sarah. That would have required a recasting of the part- Sharon Smyth was noticeably older when we saw Sarah die in January 1968 than she was when Sarah was a ghost in June 1967, and by now we would wonder what she has been eating in the afterlife that has made her get so much taller. Besides, Miss Smyth* had stopped acting by this point.

The process of planning the stories was in two stages, a rough sketching of themes six months in advance, and a capsule of each episode written thirteen weeks ahead of time. There was a lot of flexibility when it came to putting those plans into effect. Some stories that were supposed to end within thirteen weeks were extended over years, while others that were expected to be a big deal petered out before they got going. In an interview preserved by Danny Horn at his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, writer Violet Welles said that many of the moments on the show that made the least sense were those written when the plans hadn’t worked out: “toward the end of the cycle, you’d have characters who were really not a lot of interest who had to play scenes with other characters who really didn’t have a lot of interest, dealing with things that basically didn’t concern them. Those were hard to write.”  

This episode was taped on 25 July 1969; thirteen weeks before that was 21 May. Six months before was 25 January. By 25 January, Denise Nickerson had been on the show for two months as Amy Jennings. Nickerson was actually born on 1 April 1957, but they several times say that Amy is nine years old. When the show goes to 1897, Nickerson plays Nora Collins, who is also nine. On 19 May, Nickerson taped #761, the last episode she would appear in until #782. She is currently in the middle of a second long absence from 1897, unseen between #783 and #812. Her characters were so important in the months leading up to the 1897 segment and she played them so well that we wonder what they were thinking leaving her in the background so long.

Maybe they were thinking of bringing her back as Sarah. Nickerson didn’t look all that much like Sharon Smyth, and was a far more accomplished young actress than was Miss Smyth, but she did have brown hair, and the show prioritized hair color above all else in recasting parts. For example, two actresses followed Mrs Isles in the role of Vicki, neither of whom had much in common with her either in acting style or in looks, but who both had black hair. So perhaps there was a time when they intended to travel between 1897 and the 1790s and to meet Sarah, played by Denise Nickerson. If Nickerson were still alive, perhaps someone would ask her if she posed for the portrait that is standing on the floor of the Evans cottage today.

*She’s been using her married name for decades now, but when talking about her as a child it’s pretty weird to refer to her as “Mrs Lentz.” Since I use surnames for people associated with the making of the show and attach courtesy titles to surnames of living people, I have to call her “Miss Smyth.”

Episode 806: You’re not thinking of the foolish things

Charity Trask walks into the drawing room of the great house on the estate of Collinwood and finds a paper on the desk. It is a full confession to the murder of her mother, the late Minerva Trask, signed by her father Gregory and by Collins family attorney Evan Hanley. It also bears a red seal.

Trask enters and Charity tells him what she has read. He rants and raves for a while, claiming that she must be under the Devil’s power if she believes the confession. He forces her onto her knees and orders her to pray, then tries to destroy the paper.

Charity prays. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later, Gregory Trask is alone in the drawing room. It goes dark, a violent storm suddenly breaks out, the windows blow open, and the flames surge much higher in the fireplace than we have ever seen them. Trask cries out for Minerva to leave him alone. When he calls himself an innocent man, the storm rages more fiercely than ever.

The storm ends as quickly as it began, and a man appears in the doorway. He asks who Trask was talking to, and Trask denies that he was talking to anyone. Trask mentions the storm, and the man says there hasn’t been a bit of wind all day. Trask turns and sees that the window is closed and there is no sign of a storm outside.

The man identifies himself as Charles Delaware Tate. Trask recognizes the name as that of a nationally famous painter. Tate explains that the late Edith Collins commissioned him to paint a portrait of her grandson, Quentin Collins, but that Quentin has refused to sit for him. He asks Trask for a photograph of Quentin. Trask remembers that there is such a photograph in a drawer in the desk. When he opens the drawer, the confession falls out, undestroyed.

Returning viewers know that Tate is associated with a 150 year old sorcerer known as Count Petofi. We also know that Petofi is currently residing in the body of twelve year old Jamison Collins and is casting spells to expose the secrets of various people connected with Collinwood. Jamison’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins the vampire is doing battle with Petofi, and has locked Jamison/ Petofi in the prison cell in the basement of the Old House on the estate. That has done little to curb his power; from the cell, he was able to project himself into a dream of Evan’s, cast a spell on him, and compel him to draw up the paper Trask keeps trying to destroy. Jamison/ Petofi does seem anxious to get out of the cell, however. He offers to cure Quentin of lycanthropy if he lets him out. When broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi talks Quentin out of accepting the offer, Jamison/ Petofi growls a threat at her.

We do not know why Petofi wants Tate to paint a portrait of Quentin, but we get a clue at the end of the episode. Tate has rented a house which longtime viewers will recognize as the Evans cottage. For the first two years of the show, the Evans cottage was a frequent set. It was home to artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. In December 1966 and January 1967, an unseen force compelled Sam to paint portraits of undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Those portraits had supernatural powers. They were not alone. Portraits have been a prominent part of the show’s set decoration from the very beginning, and have been a gateway between the world of the living and the world of the dead since #70. We may well assume, then, that Tate’s portrait of Quentin will also have uncanny powers.

Charity is visiting Tate in the cottage and looking at the portrait. He has only been working for a day or two, and he says it will take him about two weeks to finish. Yet the figure is almost finished now. As Charity studies it, Quentin’s face turns into that of the werewolf. In May and June of 1968, they did a story partly based on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and in #701, the very first episode in which he could speak, Quentin compared pictures and people, saying that one changes while the other stays the same. So we are prepared to see Quentin’s curse transferred from his body to his portrait.

Episode 794: The hand doesn’t always bring out the best in people

Soap operas usually have at least one set representing a public gathering place where characters can meet one another unexpectedly. By this point in the development of Dark Shadows, the population of its universe is so heavy with monsters and witches that unexpected meetings usually take place in graveyards, or basements, or out in the woods someplace. But for the first seventy three weeks of the show, one of the most important meeting places was a tavern called The Blue Whale, and as the bartender Bob O’Connell was a significant, though almost always silent, presence.

The Blue Whale has been mentioned occasionally since those days, most recently in #704, shortly after vampire Barnabas Collins traveled back in time to the year 1897. Today is the first time we visit the Blue Whale in the 1897 segment, and the first time we have seen Bob O’Connell as the man pouring since #439, when Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. In those days, the tavern was called The Eagle and O’Connell’s character’s name was Mr Mooney.

When we arrive at the tavern today, there is only one customer, a young man sitting at a table. When the bartender sets a drink in front of him, he orders a Chartreuse. The bartender moves to take the drink he has just served, apparently thinking the young man changed his mind, but the young man explains that he is waiting for someone else. This man, a heavyset fellow with gray side whiskers, enters a moment before the bartender brings his liqueur.

The bartender wonders if Aristide still wants the drink he originally ordered. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The younger man is known to returning viewers as a knife-wielding criminal named Aristide, the older as his master, who calls himself Victor Fenn Gibbon. The two urgently discuss a woman named Angelique. Fenn Gibbon tells Aristide that he can almost forgive him for being so distracted by Angelique’s beauty that he allowed her to take “the Hand” from him, and furthermore that she appears to have magical powers. He says that he showed forged papers to one Edward Collins, and that on the basis of those papers Edward concluded that he was “a member of the British aristocracy” and invited him to stay at the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Aristide will have to stay in the village of Collinsport, since Fenn Gibbon does not want their association to become known to the Collinses. Aristide is bitterly disappointed.

This will remind longtime viewers of seagoing con man Jason McGuire and his sidekick, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. Jason turned up in March 1967 with a sinister plan and soon took up residence as a guest at Collinwood. Shortly afterward, Willie joined him. At first Jason insisted Willie stay in town. He made that insistence while sitting at virtually the same spot Fenn Gibbon and Aristide occupy today, and Willie reacted with the same disappointment Aristide shows when he was told to stay in a flophouse when his co-conspirator was to be a guest in a mansion.

When Fenn Gibbon tells us that the letters he showed Edward were forgeries, he raises the question of his real name. He seems to have a whimsical sense of humor, and a double barreled name that sounds like a species of small ape found in a peat marsh would appeal to someone trying to test the credulity of an American impressed by the naming conventions of the British upper classes. And indeed, returning viewers know that Edward lacks a sense of humor, is quite a snob, and displays all the tell-tale signs of a hopeless case of Anglophilia.

A small young woman takes her place at the bar. Fenn Gibbon recognizes her as of Romani extraction. He becomes agitated and leaves, but directs Aristide to get to know her. Aristide, whom returning viewers saw meet with misfortune when he tried to pick up Angelique, gladly complies. She responds to his initial approach with a flat declaration that she isn’t interested, but when he mentions the other Romani people in the area, she perks up. She gives her name as Julianka, and asks if he knows a woman named Magda. He says he has met her.

This will intrigue returning viewers. The other day, Aristide robbed Edward’s brother Quentin of the legendary “Hand of Count Petofi,” a severed appendage which broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi had stolen from Romani chieftain/ organized crime boss King Johnny Romana and which she plans to use to lift a curse she had placed that made Quentin a werewolf. When Quentin told Magda what had happened, he described Aristide only as a “young man.” If Magda really has met Aristide, Quentin’s reticent reply would have cost him an opportunity to help Magda figure out who her enemies really are.

Whether or not Aristide has met Magda, he does know where she lives. He escorts her to the grounds of the Old House at Collinwood. He does not offer to accompany her into the house, but asks her to meet him later at the Blue Whale. As Angelique had responded to Aristide’s overtures by choking him within an inch of his life, Julianka responds to them by drawing a dagger. Aristide just doesn’t have game.

After Aristide parts from Julianka, the werewolf pounces on him. He is about to be devoured when Fenn Gibbon shows up. The sight of pretty little Julianka drove Fenn Gibbon away in a barely concealed panic, but the werewolf doesn’t scare him a bit. He talks calmly to the werewolf, and says that he has orders for him. The werewolf docilely complies. This would be a much bigger surprise if the werewolf were not an adorable little doggie wearing a tidy suit with a watch fob, but it still sends the message that Fenn Gibbon has very extensive powers.

In the Old House, Julianka meets Barnabas. She says that she can use the Hand of Count Petofi to cure Quentin. She also says that Magda’s husband Sandor is in Montreal. This point will be of interest to regular viewers. We haven’t seen Sandor since #750. We may well have been wondering whatever happened to him. We are particularly likely to have been wondering about that this week, since Thayer David, who plays him, is playing Fenn Gibbon. They don’t usually double actors within a time period, and so Fenn Gibbon’s introduction might have suggested they wanted us simply to forget about Sandor. If they are going to take the trouble to tell us he is in Montreal, perhaps we can hope he will return before long, and simply not share scenes with Fenn Gibbon.

Barnabas is in a glum mood. He always is, more or less, but especially so when he has had to deal with Angelique. She told him earlier that she has moved on from her centuries-long fixation on him and now wants to marry Quentin. Barnabas responds with disbelief, declaring that the only reason she would do that is to spite him. Since her obsession led her to turn him into a vampire and kill everyone he ever loved, you can see that Barnabas would have mixed feelings when she tells him that she is looking for a fresh start. On the one hand, it suggest the possibility that he might achieve some kind of freedom. But he’s still a bloodsucking ghoul, his sister and mother and true love and uncle and aunt and countless others are still dead, and the person behind all that doesn’t even care about it anymore.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that it is only appropriate that Angelique made Barnabas a vampire. Angelique too is phenomenally selfish, and whatever she creates becomes a replica of herself. So of course her greatest achievement is to turn a man into a metaphor for extreme selfishness. Barnabas’ selfishness tempers his rage at Angelique’s news; when Julianka comes to him, he is deep in thought, no doubt brooding about what it all means for him.

In his post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn shows that the relationship between Fenn Gibbon and Aristide is modeled on that between Gutman and Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon, and he and his commenters demonstrate that that novel and its 1941 film version included explicit hints that Gutman and Wilmer were occasional sex partners. Aristide has been so eager to connect with the ladies that it’s hard to see much gay subtext between him and Fenn Gibbon so far, but it’s early days for them on the show. Moreover, the echo of Jason and Willie reminds us of the hints the show dropped that those two had shared more than a firm handshake at some point in their seafaring days. The original series bible and the early drafts of the first scripts had referred to The Blue Whale as “The Rainbow Bar”; maybe Aristide and Fenn Gibbon are destined to bring that name back.

Episode 787: You said that, I said nothing

Dark Shadows fans like to make jokes about the inefficiency of law enforcement in the fictional town of Collinsport, but in this episode we see that the sheriff and his men really never had a chance. The ancient and esteemed Collins family controls everything in the area, and they will go to any lengths to keep the police from obtaining the information they need to do their job effectively.

Stuffy Edward Collins invokes the police when he demands that broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi vacate the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Magda laughs and says that if the police show up, she will tell them that Edward’s distant cousin Barnabas is a vampire. Horrified at the damage it would do to the Collins family name were word of Barnabas’ condition to get out, Edward backs down. Barnabas is at large and has been responsible for at least six homicides since traveling through time to the year 1897, including the murder of Edward’s brother Carl in the drawing room of their home just the other day. But evidently that is a small matter to Edward compared to the danger that the sheriff might be indiscreet.

Barnabas materializes at the police station, where a werewolf is being held in custody. A deputy is startled to see Barnabas in front of him all of a sudden. For only the third time in the series, Barnabas says “Look into my eyes!” and induces an hypnotic trance in someone not his blood thrall. It is the first time he has exercised this power on someone other than Edward’s nine year old daughter Nora. Barnabas tells the deputy that once he has completed his task, he will remember nothing. So he is following the family policy with regard to keeping the police in total ignorance.

Edward shows up and sees Barnabas. Edward is wearing a cross and holding a revolver loaded with six silver bullets, which on Dark Shadows are as effective against vampires as they are against werewolves. Barnabas hides behind the deputy and tells Edward that he is acting in the interests of the future of the Collins family. Edward says that he belongs to the past, not the future. Barnabas doesn’t explain anything; he vanishes.

Not exactly an heroic look for ol’ Barney. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas’ post-hypnotic suggestion has its effect, and the deputy is bewildered to find himself face to face with Edward. Edward tells him that they must watch the werewolf. The deputy starts to say something about the sheriff, and Edward replies “The sheriff doesn’t realize what this animal is!” Of course he doesn’t, no one will tell him anything about it.

Back in the Old House, Barnabas and Magda lament their failures. He could not take the werewolf from the cell in the police station to the cell in the basement of the house; she could not persuade lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley to return a severed hand he stole from them. They wanted to do these things because the werewolf is Edward’s brother Quentin, whom Magda is trying to free from his curse by means of the hand’s magical powers. Barnabas knows that if they do not succeed, terrible consequences will ensue in 1969.

Closing Miscellany

It is a serious mistake to show the werewolf when he is not in the act of committing a spectacular homicide. They didn’t have the budget to put him in full-body makeup, so he wears a tidy little suit, complete with a watch fob. He is so well put together that it is difficult to imagine him inspiring any fear other than the fear that one will not meet his apparently rather exacting standards of attire.

Whoooo’s a well-dressed doggie? You are! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is a noteworthy blooper in this one. Magda confronts Evan, declaring “The book, I know you took it from the Old House!” Usually actors roll with each other’s bobbled lines, but this is far enough out that Humbert Allen Astredo obviously has no idea where Grayson Hall is in the script. All he can do is ask “The book?” “The hand!” she corrects.

They also make a goof in the closing credits. This is one of three consecutive days when Louis Edmonds is billed not as Edward, but as Roger Collins, the role he plays in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. He’s been identified correctly throughout the first seventeen weeks of the 1897 segment and everyone else is identified correctly in these episodes, so it is not clear what happened.

Danny Horn’s posts at Dark Shadows Every Day are often laugh-out-loud funny, and the one for this episode is especially so. His description of the scene between Magda and Evan has some big laughs, and when he imagines the sheriff’s deputies trying to catch the werewolf by “putting on their alluring lady-werewolf disguises a la the Warner Brothers cartoons,” well that’s just super how could anyone improve on it.

Episode 786: Dreams of long ago

The evil Gregory Trask has married Judith Collins and become the master of the estate of Collinwood. Trask shows his daughter, the repressed Charity, her new home in the great house. In the drawing room, Trask tells Charity that he wants her to marry Judith’s brother, the rakish Quentin, to whom he refers as the one eligible bachelor remaining in the Collins family. This is odd- like his brother Quentin, Edward Collins is a widower, and unlike Quentin Edward is sufficiently conscious of the appearance of propriety that it would be relatively easy for the sanctimonious Trask to control him. Besides, Edward’s son Jamison is Judith’s heir, giving Trask a reason to keep a close eye on both of them.

Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi enters and announces that she wants to speak with maidservant Beth Chavez. Trask says that he wants to talk to Magda alone in the drawing room. Charity wants to leave anyway; she hasn’t visited her mother’s grave today. Trask is worried because it is dark and both a vampire and a werewolf are loose on the grounds of the estate, but he and Charity decide it will probably be fine, so off she goes.

Trask gives Magda 24 hours to vacate her home in the Old House on the estate. She tells him she can prove that he murdered his first wife, prompting Trask to reconsider the eviction notice.

Magda lowers the boom on Trask. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the woods, Charity sees the werewolf, whom we know to be Quentin. She runs back home in a panic. Trask initially opposes Magda’s offer to walk Charity to her bedroom, but when she insists he crumbles. While Charity rests, Magda takes out her tarot deck and tells Charity she will read the cards for her. She brushes Charity’s objections aside as lightly as she had her father’s. She finds that Charity will be paired with an attractive man, but that this man is evil and that she must avoid him at all costs.

Charity has a dream in which she and Quentin speak tenderly to each other and kiss, only for him to zone out while a werewolf appears. The bulk of Charity’s dream consists of her and Quentin striking poses while the soundtrack plays the sickly little waltz Quentin obsessively plays on his gramophone, and David Selby’s voice recites some dreary lyrics that apparently go with it. This does nothing to explain the characters’ in-universe motivations, but it does explain the real-world reason why Dan Curtis wanted the writers to get the audience thinking of Charity and Quentin as a potential couple and to have her encounter the werewolf. In his post about the episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn explains that the sequence is product placement for some records that were released around this time. It’s interesting that Charity has inherited so much of her father’s money-mindedness that she sells advertising time in her dreams, but the actual sequence is unbelievably tedious to watch.

Episode 766: The weeping Dorcas

Vampire Barnabas Collins happens upon his unwilling sidekick, ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, after she has fired a silver bullet at his distant cousin, werewolf Quentin Collins. He sternly forbids her to finish Quentin off, and for some reason she decides he is right.

Back in human form, Quentin is haunted by the ghost of Dorcas Trilling, a woman he killed in his first night as a werewolf. He has been telling himself that the evil deeds of the werewolf are not his own responsibilities, but that “he” is the culprit. That comforts him, but Dorcas isn’t having it. So he instantly collapses into, “All right, I did, but I couldn’t help it!” That doesn’t go over any better.

Unfortunately, this is Gail Strickland’s final appearance on Dark Shadows. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas and Quentin have a confrontation. Barnabas tells Quentin that he knows his secret and says that he wants only to help him; Quentin angrily responds that he cannot trust Barnabas, who refuses to tell him anything about himself. He does ask Barnabas to kill him if it is the only way to keep him from turning into the werewolf again, so I suppose that is a step towards friendship.

Episode 765: The animal in the woods

In the spring of 1969, the twin crises created by the malign ghost of Quentin Collins and the werewolf curse upon drifter Chris Jennings had combined to kill a number of people, bring others to the point of death, and make life on the estate of Collinwood utterly intolerable. Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins and his friends found some I Ching wands in Quentin’s old room and tried to use them to communicate with the ghost. Instead, they caused Barnabas to come unstuck in time. In #701, Barnabas found himself in the year 1897, his own curse of vampirism once again in full force.

Today, Barnabas bites Quentin’s girlfriend, maidservant Beth Chavez, and makes her tell him everything she knows about the werewolf curse. He was in a position to know all of this before he bit her; much of it he could have figured out if he had been paying attention to the information available to him in the late 1960s. But the show has been gaining lots of new viewers lately, and they probably appreciate the recap.

Quentin was married to a woman named Jenny, who unknown to him was the sister of ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi. Quentin left Jenny in 1895. Neither Quentin nor Magda knew at that time that Jenny was pregnant. Quentin’s siblings Edward and Judith put the story out that Jenny had gone away, and locked her up in a room hidden in the house. They enlisted Beth, her former maid, to be Jenny’s keeper. By the time she gave birth to boy-girl twins, Jenny had gone entirely insane.

In #720, Jenny escaped and stabbed Quentin. She escaped again in #748, and Quentin strangled her. When Magda found out that Quentin had killed Jenny, she cursed him and his male descendants to be werewolves. In #763, Beth told Magda about the twins; Magda’s reaction made it clear to Beth that she was powerless to lift the curse. Regular viewers already know that. The audience first heard Magda’s name months before she appeared on the show, when she spoke at a séance in #642 and expressed deep regret about “my currrrrse,” which we knew to be connected to both Quentin and the werewolf. In #684 and #685, Barnabas found a silver pentagram that Quentin and Beth bought in 1897 on a chain around the neck of a dead baby, and identified it as an amulet to ward off werewolves. Barnabas learned yesterday that Beth had bought the pentagram, and she confirms today that it is for Quentin’s son to wear. She also bought a similar pendant for herself, and is wearing it.

There is a full moon tonight, and most of the episode is taken up with the mechanics of people getting ready to go into the woods to hunt the werewolf, coming back from the woods where they have been hunting the werewolf, and telephoning to ask others to join in hunting the werewolf.

Magda has a pistol and loads it with silver bullets. Some wonder where Magda came up with silver bullets, but in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at Dark Shadows Every Day someone posting as “cslh324” reminds us that in #757 Magda persuaded undead blonde fire witch Laura to give her the money to buy silver bullets with which to shoot Barnabas. One of Magda’s purposes in putting this plan forward was to get Laura to leave her alone in the room so that she could steal a magical doodad from her, but it turns out Magda really did buy the silver bullets.

The werewolf gets into the great house of Collinwood and attacks Judith. Beth shows up in the nick of time and shows the werewolf her pentagram. He flees. Judith asks why the werewolf would run away from her, and Beth refuses to explain. At first she denies that it happened, then she asserts that the werewolf is probably as afraid of them as they are of him.

The confrontation between Judith and the werewolf includes a spectacular stunt. The werewolf jumps over the railing on the walkway above the foyer and holds a stationary two-point landing on the floor twelve feet below. Alex Stevens deserves high praise for that.

When we hear the sound effects associated with the werewolf or see the consequences of his attacks or catch a glimpse of him as a blur in the middle of a cloud of shattering glass, we can be afraid of him. Unfortunately, the show often gives us a long look at him, and he is not scary at all. They didn’t have the schedule or the makeup budget to cover his whole body in fur, so he wears Quentin’s suit. Seeing him standing there in that little outfit you don’t want Magda to shoot him with her silver bullets. At most, you might swat him with a rolled-up newspaper and tell him he is a bad doggie.

You have to stop killing people, or you won’t get any more bickies! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Beth does not want Judith to suspect that Quentin is the werewolf, but it really doesn’t make any sense that she won’t tell her about the apotropaic power of the silver pentagram. You’d think she would want everyone on the estate and in the neighboring village of Collinsport to wear such pendants for the duration of Quentin’s curse. Surely she could come up with some explanation as to how she knew about the silver pentagram that wouldn’t invite questions she couldn’t answer.

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.