Tag: wheelchair

Episode 942: Michael grown

Our Story So Far

The current A story revolves around a race of Elder Gods called the Leviathan People. The Leviathans have taken over the minds of several characters and formed them into a cult devoted to advancing their plan to return to Earth and supplant humankind. As part of this plan, a monster has taken up residence in the room above the antique shop in the village of Collinsport. The monster’s true form is bizarre, terrifying, and unseen. It can assume other forms, and as it was growing it went through the shapes of a series of children. Now its human guise is that of a man in his twenties who, when first we saw him, invited people to “Call me Jabe.”

Jabe is a blowhard, impatient, petulant, and unreflective. He is keen to take heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard as his bride and make her into the same kind of monster he is. Carolyn’s distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, was the Leviathans’ first choice as leader of the cult, and has now become disaffected from it. Working with another distant cousin, the perennially youthful Quentin Collins, Barnabas has for the moment put a stop to Jabe’s plans for Carolyn. Jabe has killed a couple of people, including Carolyn’s father Paul Stoddard and Sheriff Davenport, and plans to kill many more. He is fairly sure that Barnabas is working against him, but is afraid that if he strikes out at Barnabas his own superiors among the Leviathans will punish him. Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and her cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, are devoted members of the cult, as is Quentin’s great-granddaughter Amy Jennings, but none of them knows about Jabe’s plans for Carolyn.

When Jabe appeared to be a thirteen year old boy named Michael, he spent a substantial amount of time bullying David. He has continued this in his adult form, breaking David’s leg for no reason to which the audience was made privy. David’s governess, Maggie Evans, saw Michael’s mistreatment of David and tried to stop it, and in response he locked her up and tried to kill her. No one has told Maggie that Michael and Jabe are the same person, but she does know that that Jabe is at fault for David’s injury. She has also, in the last several days, seemed to be getting very cozy with Barnabas. Jabe has abducted Maggie and has her locked up in a big mausoleum someplace.

Meet Bruno

Jabe is in the antique shop when a man wearing a fur coat enters. Regular viewers recognize the actor as Michael Stroka. For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897, and Stroka played the sadistic Aristide, henchman to sorcerer Count Petofi. Petofi was a witty and whimsical villain, and Aristide spent a great deal of time as his straight man. Aristide also gave Stroka opportunities to show off his own formidable gift for deadpan comedy.

Bruno and Jabe. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The fur coat is so specific to 1970 that the sight of Stroka wearing it means that the show has very literally returned to “contemporary dress.” His character introduces himself to Jabe as Bruno, and says that he will help him in any way. Bruno shows considerable knowledge of the story so far; the other cultists didn’t come with that knowledge, leading us to wonder whether he is one of them or is some kind of supernatural being. As the episode goes on, we see that Bruno shares Aristide’s fascination with knives and his glee in threatening to kill and disfigure pretty girls, and is also about as ineffective when he sets about doing Jeb’s dirty work as Aristide was when he tried to do Petofi’s. So however he came to know what he knows, it seems safe to dismiss the idea that he is anything other than what Aristide was.

David and Barnabas

At the great house of Collinwood, David enters by means of wheelchair. He and Barnabas talk about Maggie’s unexplained absence. They consider the possibility that Jabe might be responsible for it.

Just the other day, adult characters not in on the secret of the Leviathan cult mentioned that David did not seem like “the same little boy” he had been. He isn’t a little boy at all- he’s thirteen. Barnabas talks to him in this scene as one adult to another. After all these years, it’s refreshing to see a sign that David might eventually be allowed to grow up.

Maggie’s First Tormenter

Maggie awakens to find herself in a mausoleum. Before she can make her way to the door, the late Sheriff Davenport enters. Jabe has raised him from the dead and made him his slave. Your typical zombie is an inarticulate sort, who, if moved to speech at all, might emit a faint groan of “Brai-i-i-ins.” Davenport is an exception to this norm. He is positively chatty. He talks about how uncomfortable his grave was, about his sympathy for Maggie, and even starts in with a story about his wife. The guy just won’t shut up.

David and Jabe

David goes to the antique shop. How he got himself from Collinwood to the village in a manual wheelchair designed for use in a hospital is not explained. He tells Jabe about his conversation with Barnabas, including the part where Barnabas told him to study the holy book of the Leviathans and look for information about Jabe’s weaknesses. He says that he found a passage saying that Jabe is vulnerable to werewolves. He didn’t tell Barnabas about this, but came straight to the shop. Jabe is terrified by the mention of werewolves, and relieved David didn’t talk to Barnabas. He tells him not to trust Barnabas.

Jabe and David. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is a werewolf on the show, Amy’s brother Chris Jennings, who inherited the curse from their great-grandfather Quentin. Quentin’s own lycanthropy was put into abeyance by the same magic spell that immunized him against aging. We haven’t seen Chris for about a month, when there was a full moon and he killed a character left over from an exhausted storyline. There were some hints early in the current story that Chris represented a threat to the Leviathans, and this is now confirmed.

Maggie’s Second Tormenter

Bruno shows up in the crypt where the late Sheriff Davenport is haranguing Maggie. He sends Davenport to guard the door. Maggie asks Bruno if he is dead, too. He assures her he isn’t, and is very unpleasant to her. Aristide was a lot of fun when he had someone to play off of, but where Petofi was sprightly, Jeb is monotonous. While Aristide would set his sights on victims who gave him more resistance than he bargained for, Maggie’s situation makes her tense and unwilling to volunteer anything. Maggie holds her ground and refuses to answer any of Bruno’s questions, so that he cannot afford to murder her as he had intended to do. That’s logical behavior on her part and a happy ending for the audience, but it does keep Bruno from doing anything to make us want to see him again.

Bruno meets David

Bruno goes to the antique shop. Jeb introduces him to David. He pushes David out of the shop with a brisk movement that is Stroka’s first opportunity to get a laugh as Bruno. He reports his failure to Jabe, who is too afraid of werewolves to rage at him as he has raged at everyone else who has told him things he didn’t want to hear.

Maggie’s Third Tormenter

Jabe goes to the crypt and sends Sheriff Davenport back out. He confronts Maggie, who tells him she recognizes him as “Michael grown up,” using the exact phrase David had used with Barnabas earlier. He tells her she will be all right if she opens a wooden box he has brought with him and looks in it. Returning viewers know that this is “the Leviathan Box,” and that it was by opening it and looking inside that Amy came under the power of the cult.

Episode 937: The list of the expendables

A monster from beyond space and time has taken the form of a vicious man-child and asked people to call it “Jabe.” A cult devoted to the Leviathan People, mysterious Elder Gods who brought the monster to Earth, have decided to put up with its murders and depredations, but even they draw the line at calling the monster “Jabe.” It answers to “Jeb” instead.

Jabe’s latest pointless act of cruelty was to break the leg of one of his faithful servants, thirteen year old David Collins. A couple of times today, Jabe is about to explain why he broke David’s leg, and each time they cut away to some other scene. At one point we cut back to Jabe telling David that “Now you know why I had to do that, don’t you?,” to which David agrees that he does. That just lampshades the fact that the writers couldn’t come up with a reason.

David wants Maggie to be the first to sign his cast.

The actual reason David Collins is wearing a cast and using a wheelchair is that actor David Henesy took a nasty spill on the ice. And since Jabe’s untrammeled violence is the big menace on the show right now, it makes sense that they would have him be at fault. It certainly makes more sense than does the fact that the family insists on David climbing the stairs to his bedroom with crutches, when they have a whole disused wing of servants’ bedrooms on the first floor in any one of which he could stay while he recuperates. On the other hand, that insistence does produce a moment of real hilarity. The instant David begins his ascent, governess Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott) and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman start talking as if he weren’t there. He must be lumbering up the stairs a couple of feet from them the whole time they are carrying on this conversation.

For his part, Jabe doesn’t generate any laughs. Nor is he pursuing any goals that lead us to wonder what he will do next. We just know that if he has a chance to do something nasty, he’ll probably take it.

If they want Jabe to be a character in whom we take an interest, they ought to give him some kind of cockamamie motivation that is intelligible only to him. That’s what they did in 1967, when vampire Barnabas Collins held Maggie prisoner and tortured her. They showed us that Barnabas thought he was going to turn Maggie into his lost love Josette. That idea, borrowed from the 1932 film The Mummy, was so utterly bonkers the show eventually decided to run with it, casting Miss Scott as Josette when they went back in time to explain how Barnabas became a vampire. Meanwhile, the ever-mounting zaniness kept viewers tuning in, wondering if they would ever expose a layer of Barnabas’ psychology that was composed of something other than nonsense.

The opening voiceover today labels Jabe “evil”; that’s no problem, all the most popular characters, including David, started off as appallingly evil, and they have retained their popularity to the extent that they stayed in touch with their roots. But Jabe is not only evil, he is monotonous, and that makes him a deadly threat to the show’s entertainment value.

Barnabas is not currently subject to the effects of the vampire curse, and Julia long ago used her powers as a mad scientist to erase Maggie’s memory of his crimes against her. Barnabas was the original leader of the Leviathan cult, but has become disaffected. Jabe tells Barnabas today that he wants to kill just about everyone at Collinwood, including ten year old Amy Jennings, who is a faithful member of the cult. He also wants to marry heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Barnabas goes to Collinwood and warns Maggie that Carolyn is in danger. He asks her to keep an eye on Carolyn and to urge her to go away. He does not mention Amy. At least Amy’s name comes up in this episode- when she is on camera she is often the best thing in the show, but throughout her long absences she usually goes unmentioned.

Julia goes to Amy’s great-grandfather, centenarian Quentin Collins, who has recently returned to Collinsport after an absence of many decades and who, because of a series of spells that were cast on him, looks like he is not quite 29 years old. Julia recruits Quentin to dig up the grave of Michael Hackett, Jabe’s previous incarnation. This gives us the first exhumation scene on Dark Shadows since, if I recall correctly, #820. It’s the longest the show has gone without digging up a coffin since the first exhumation scene, in #179. It feels like a homecoming when Quentin sticks his shovel in the plot. Of course they find an empty coffin.

As is usual when digging up a coffin, Quentin wears a three-piece suit with dress shoes, none of which is smudged in the process. Less typically, his coat appears to be somewhat wrinkled.

Afterward, Julia confronts Barnabas. When she tells him how much she already knows, he gives in and says he will tell her everything. With that, we have the promise that Barnabas and Julia will resume the partnership that has been the single most dynamic narrative element on Dark Shadows.