Tag: wheelchair

Episode 1119: Where the Devil is everybody.

Ben Stokes

From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that period, we learned how scion Barnabas Collins first became the vampire we had met in April 1967, and more importantly learned that he could be interesting even if he were not a vampire.

We also met much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes. Ben was played by Thayer David, who first joined the cast of Dark Shadows in 1966 as crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. Matthew was so maniacally devoted to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard that he inadvertently killed a friend of hers whom he imagined to be her enemy and was about to deliberately murder another of her favorite people, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, when the ghosts who haunt the estate of Collinwood emerged from the background and did him in. When we met Ben, he was as open-hearted and kindly as Matthew was dark and twisted.

Barnabas was the one member of the Collins family who took a liking to Ben. He taught Ben to read. Later, Barnabas would press his father, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, to free Ben from his indenture. When Barnabas became a vampire, Ben repaid his kindness by protecting him and abetting his crimes. Eventually, Ben’s devotion to “Mistah Bah-nah-bahs” led him to recreate the very crimes that triggered Matthew’s destruction, killing a man in the course of a struggle and murdering a woman in cold blood. We saw that he and Matthew were two versions of the same character. Ben became what Matthew was after a few months in the shadow of the Collins family curse. Matthew had spent his entire life in the shadow of that curse, and so he was doomed from the beginning.

Barnabas brought the vampire curse on himself when he met the gracious Josette, jumped to the conclusion that she could never love him, and consoled himself in a brief affair with her aunt’s maid Angelique. Unknown to Barnabas, Angelique had a talent for witchcraft. When it turned out that Josette did love Barnabas and agreed to marry him, Barnabas cast Angelique aside. Humiliated and enraged, Angelique used her powers of witchcraft to make him into a ghoul and sentence him to exist forever without love. The vampire curse was dramatically satisfying, because Barnabas had been so selfish that it was fitting he should be reduced to a metaphor for extreme selfishness. And Angelique’s declaration that anyone who loved him would die gave an extra pathos to his underestimate of his own lovableness.

As his involvement with Angelique led to Barnabas’ destruction, so Ben’s involvement with her blighted his life. He met Angelique in #372, and thought she was making a sexual overture to him. Without further ado, he walked up to her and took her in his arms. She gave him something to drink first, which made him the victim of a spell that subjected him to her will. As Angelique’s slave, he did harm to Barnabas and others whom he loved, filling him with anguish and self-loathing. Ben did not share Barnabas’ selfishness, so there would have been little point in making him a vampire. But his desperate response to Barnabas’ kindnesses suggests that he, too, believes himself to be unlovable.

Now, the show has traveled back in time again. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman, Barnabas’ devoted friend in 1970, escaped a disaster in that year by passing through a time warp that took her to 1840, when the seeds of the disaster were planted. Barnabas used some mumbo-jumbo to project his 1970 personality into his body as it was in 1840 and joined her there. The two of them needed help establishing themselves in the Collinwood of that period. They found that Ben was living there and that he was still devoted to Barnabas. Ben was very old, but also amazingly resourceful. He was able to provide Julia with contemporary clothing and a set of luggage that she seemed to have left at the Collinsport Inn, and to substantiate the story that Barnabas and Julia were the son and daughter of the original Barnabas Collins. Now they are securely ensconced in the bosom of the Collins family. At the rate Ben has enabled them to go, Julia and Barnabas should be able to solve all the problems they face in another week or two.

Of course, it cannot be so. Ben sees that Desmond Collins, a cousin of the Collinses who live in the great house, has brought a severed head back from a trip to the southeastern coast of China. Ben recognizes this loathsome thing as an object that was mentioned in connection with a series of murders many years before. He has gone to Desmond’s home, a mansion known as Rose Cottage, and left a book with a chapter about the murders and a note urging him to destroy the head. He also spent some time looking at the head and telling it he was going to see to it that it was destroyed. That turns out to have been unwise; when Ben is walking home through the woods, the head appears to him and he cries out in distress. The next morning, Ben’s corpse is found. It looks as if he tried to cut his own head off.

The Happy Couple

In March 1969, Barnabas began the longest of all Dark Shadows’ excursions backward in time when he went to the year 1897. When he arrived at Collinwood, the matriarch of the house was dying. She was Edith Collins, nonagenarian widow of Gabriel Collins. On her deathbed, Edith reminisced about the difficult relationship she and her darling Gabriel had with Gabriel’s father, Daniel Collins, master of Collinwood. At the time, that startled longtime viewers. We had seen Daniel as a twelve year old boy in the 1790s segment, and he seemed pleasant enough. But if we were to believe that he was the man his daughter-in-law remembered decades after his death, he grew up to be bitter and estranged from his own nearest kin.

We have met the adult Daniel, and he is indeed a difficult sort. He is confined to the tower room in the great house because of his unfortunate tendency to mistake women for his late wife and to try to kill them as he killed her. He also has dementia, so that people have to keep telling him which members of the family are dead and what year it is. In fairness to Daniel, these points are extremely difficult for anyone to keep track of on Dark Shadows. We’ve also heard that Daniel has a heart condition that medical science as of 1840 is powerless to do anything about.

We have met Gabriel, too. He uses a manual wheelchair to get around; apparently he is quite skilled with it, since he keeps appearing in rooms on every floor of the house without any apparent assistance getting up and down stairs. He is a vicious bully, a characteristic Edith did not bring up in her deathbed reminiscences.

Today, we meet the young Edith. She is played by Terrayne Crawford, who in the 1897 segment played lady’s maid Beth Chavez. We haven’t seen her on the show since Beth’s final appearance in #880, though she did have a small part in the feature film House of Dark Shadows which was in theaters at this time.

Unlike the dying Edith of 1897, this version of the character despises Gabriel. There is an amusing idea in there. Perhaps in the 57 years between what we see today and what we saw then, Edith talked herself into believing that she and Gabriel had a lovely marriage and that only Daniel’s hostility gave them trouble.

If that was an idea they were planning to develop, they probably should not have given the part of Edith to Miss Crawford. She seems to be a very nice person, but she had severe limitations as an actress. All of the roles in the 1897 segment included dialogue which called for the depiction of multiple layers of feeling at once, and Miss Crawford was alone among the cast in failing to meet this challenge even a single time. So when Beth tells a devastatingly handsome married man that she doesn’t want him to make passes at her, that’s all there is to it- she simply does not want that, and he simply is a jerk for continuing to do it. We can see no conflict within her to set up a story in the course of which she will stop resisting his charms and begin an affair with him.

Eventually they started writing Beth as a one-dimensional character. That allowed Beth to be part of the story, but they did have to sacrifice some themes they had apparently meant to develop. So in her first appearance, Beth reacted with alarm when a Romani character dropped a hint that she was going to reveal to the Collinses that Beth was Romani, too. That fit with Beth’s origin as a servant who had come to Collinwood in the train of Jenny Collins, who was herself secretly Romani. But delivering on it would have required Beth to have more complicated feelings than Miss Crawford could be relied on to portray, so that was laid quietly to one side.

Showing the audience that Edith is the sort of person who will, in her own mind, eventually retcon her crappy marriage into a great but haunted romance would place even greater demands on a performer than would showing that Beth is hiding the facts about her ethnic background. But as we see her today, Miss Crawford seems to have become an even worse actress than she was playing Beth a year ago. She keeps changing her tone of voice in the middle of her lines for no apparent reason, making us wonder if she is trying to suppress the hiccups. That isn’t because she is tense- on the contrary, she is relaxed and comfortable, with a big grin on her face, an inexplicable affect when every conversation Edith has consists of everyone reviling and threatening everyone else.

Gabriel is in a good mood despite Edith’s loathing for him. He is blackmailing the evil Gerard Stiles into murdering Samantha Drew Collins, widow of his brother Quentin Collins. This will leave Daniel with no choice but to leave the Collins fortune to Gabriel. Samantha has no suspicion that anything like this is going on, but she does know that Gabriel hates her and cordially returns his hatred.

Gerard has told Gabriel that he will give Samantha a poison that will cause her to have a fatal stroke while he and she are in the village and Gabriel is at home, so that she will die in front of witnesses and no one will suspect him even if it is discovered that the stroke was artificially induced.

Gerard comes back to Collinwood. Gabriel menacingly says that “If you tell me anything went wrong…” Gerard replies that nothing went wrong. It is done. Delighted, Gabriel asks for all the details. Gerard says that he and Samantha made a stop at the police station to arrange for Ben’s body to be released for burial. Gabriel asks if it happened at the police station. Gerard says no, then goes on to say that they went from there to the bank. Gabriel asks if it happened at the bank. Gerard says no. He then says that they went to the courthouse. Gabriel is thrilled at the idea that it happened at the courthouse, and Gerard confirms that it did happen at the courthouse.

Gabriel asks where the body is now. Before Gerard can answer, the front door opens and the body comes walking in. What happened at the courthouse was not Samantha’s death. It was Gerard and Samantha’s wedding. Gabriel is dumbfounded.

Gabriel absorbs the news of the wedding. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When he first joined the show in January 1970, Christopher Pennock had some troubles with line delivery that limited him almost as badly as Miss Crawford’s weaknesses limited her. But he has grown by leaps and bounds over the last ten months, and he really breaks through as Gabriel. The three “It happened in the–” questions and his responses to the answers they elicit are pattern from a bit that was old when Gallagher and Shean did it in vaudeville in 1910, but he and James Storm execute it so well that it feels fresh today. The expression on his face when he learns that Samantha has married Gerard is just exquisite.

The measure of Pennock’s success came earlier in the episode, when Samantha slapped Gabriel in the face. Virginia Vestoff is likable enough that her characters can get away with almost anything, but not even she could sell an audience on an able-bodied person who physically assaults a wheelchair user. But Pennock has established Gabriel as such an utter louse that we can see Samantha’s point.

Also in this episode, Samantha clears the toys out of a space known as “The Playroom.” It is explicitly acknowledged that her son Tad had outgrown the toys in it long before, a point the fans like to make whenever The Playroom is mentioned. Samantha has set aside her earlier resolution to leave the room unchanged to honor Tad, who was washed away in a storm at sea and is presumed dead, along with his father Quentin. She has decided the time has come to move on from the past.

The time warp that brought Julia to 1840 was localized in The Playroom, so we wonder what clearing it out will do to the prospects for a return trip. Also, The Playroom occasionally popped into being, complete with Tad’s old toys, in 1970 and in 1995, due to the influence of a bunch of ghosts of people from this period. So while first-time viewers will not likely find any significance in Samantha’s redecoration project, returning viewers may have many questions about it.

Episode 1110: A room filled with toys

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has escaped from a band of zombies who were wrecking the great house of Collinwood. From her perspective, it is a few moments after she saw her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, wrestling with the zombies and urging her to save herself by walking down a mysterious staircase. But she soon discovers that she has left the year 1970 and made her way to 1840, when both the zombies and the ghosts who have triggered their destructive actions were living human beings.

Julia enters the staircase from a playroom that is only intermittently present in 1970 and walks down its two flights. She exits into the same playroom, which is a normal presence in 1840. We saw this same distortion of space in #1070 and #1071, when Julia and Barnabas used the staircase to escape from the far-off future year of 1995 and return to 1970. It was an effective way of expressing the magical nature of the staircase and the playroom then, and is still effective the second time.

When they opened the playroom door on their return to 1970, Barnabas and Julia saw a girl in the corridor. That girl appeared to be a ghost named Carrie whom they had met in 1995, but turned out to be a living girl named Hallie Stokes who had moved into Collinwood while they were away on their bizarre cosmic journey. Now, Julia opens the door and sees the living Carrie in the same corridor.

Hallie was the niece of occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes and therefore a descendant of much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes, whom we got to know from November 1967 to March 1968, when the show was set in the 1790s. We learn today that Carrie is Ben’s granddaughter, and that he and she are staying in the great house as the guests of Daniel Collins.

We saw Daniel in the 1790s segment. He was played then by David Henesy, who was eleven years old at the time. Mr Henesy looked a lot older in September 1970 than he had three years before, and he was an accomplished young actor. But it would likely have been beyond even his abilities to play a character well into middle age, so when we see Daniel from the knees down later in the episode we can be fairly sure he will turn out to be someone else.

Julia sees a confrontation between Carrie and a tall young man in a wheelchair. The man turns out to be Daniel’s son Gabriel. He insists Carrie open the door to her grandfather’s bedroom and push him in. Carrie objects, and Gabriel sneers that she is not to tell a Collins what to do at Collinwood. He berates her, saying that while others may indulge her because they are impressed by her good looks he sees only her impudence. She capitulates to his demands.

In the room, Gabriel turns his abusiveness against Ben. He orders Ben to break some bad news to Daniel. Word has come that Daniel’s son Quentin and Quentin’s son Tad have been lost at sea. Ben protests that Daniel is in no condition to receive such news. Gabriel digresses and says that he cannot make his own living; Ben tells him that many men in worse condition than he is have done, which only makes him angrier than he was to start with. Gabriel regrets his inability to stand up and strangle Ben. We can see that he’s a true Collins; they are a strangley bunch. He then says that he is now likely to become Daniel’s heir, and threatens to evict Ben and Carrie from Collinwood when he does. He menaces Ben with the prospect that he will use his position to make Carrie’s life difficult if he does not obey him now. Ben gives in.

Gabriel bullies Ben. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Ben returns to his room he finds Quentin’s wife, Samantha Drew Collins, waiting for him there. He tells her that the news did not prompt Daniel to change his will. She is still in line to inherit the estate when Daniel dies.

Samantha goes to the drawing room, where she finds Gabriel playing a one-handed game of chess. She is smugly pleased with his dismayed reaction to the news that Daniel has not changed his will. She exits and later returns with word that Daniel has escaped from the tower room. The Collinses have always made a practice of keeping mentally ill family members in that room, and Samantha and Gabriel are so frightened by his escape that we can assume Daniel’s illness disposes him to violence.

Julia emerges from the shadows in Ben’s room. Ben is alarmed to see her, and horrified when she identifies herself a friend of Barnabas’. She claims that she is not a monster, which is a defensible claim, given a very narrow definition of “monster.” When she tells him about traveling back in time from a future period when Barnabas is free to prey upon the living and she is his best friend, he says that she is mad. She denies being mad, which is what a person would do when they are as far from sanity as she is. Ben is leery, but agrees to help her. He escorts her back to the playroom and tells her to stay there until morning. Of course she leaves the room very shortly thereafter, and as soon as she enters the corridor Daniel grabs her by the throat.

The drawing room is downstairs; Ben’s room and the playroom are upstairs. No one seems to be helping Gabriel get from one floor to another, and there is no sign of any ramp or other contrivance that would make it possible for wheelchair users to get themselves from one floor of the house to another without help. Odd as this is, it is not a first on Dark Shadows. In January and February 1970, strange and troubled boy David Collins used a wheelchair in a few episodes because David Henesy had actually suffered a leg injury. David kept going up and down stairs by himself, without explanation of how such a thing was possible. I suppose they got few enough letters complaining about the illogic of that movement that they decide they could get away with it again.

Carrie has three scenes. In addition to her encounter with Gabriel, she talks with Samantha in the playroom and with her grandfather in his room. As Hallie, Kathleen Cody was in a state of maximum nervous tension from the start, so that she had nowhere to go in response to anything that might happen. As Carrie’s ghost, she often swung to the opposite extreme, being so blandly cheerful that she made no impression at all. She did put in a few good performances in the 1970 segment, however, and she is quite good as Carrie today.

Samantha is played by Virginia Vestoff, making her Dark Shadows debut. Vestoff was a distinguished performer who is now remembered chiefly for her role as Abigail Adams in the original Broadway cast of 1776 and of the 1972 film based on that musical. The Broadway cast also included several other Dark Shadows alums- David Ford (Sam Evans #2, Andre DuPres) as John Hancock, Emory Bass (Mr Best) as James Wilson, Daniel F. Keyes (The Cemetery Caretaker) as Josiah Bartlett, and Peter Lombard (Oberon) as a stage manager and understudy for the roles of Stephen Hopkins and Thomas Jefferson. All of those, aside from Lombard, also appeared in the film. Vestoff died of cancer in 1983, aged 42, a major loss to the world of the theater.

A great deal of emphasis is placed today on Samantha’s maiden name, Drew. We have in the last few months met two characters named Roxanne Drew; we can take it that Samantha will turn out to be related to one of those in some way.

Longtime viewers, learning that Daniel and Ben are in the 1840 story, will readjust their expectations. Most of what we saw in the ten weeks leading up to this uncertain and frightening journey into the past was recycled from a story that ran from December 1968 to March 1969 and culminated in a trip to the year 1897. So we may have come in thinking there would be a retelling of 1897. But seeing Ben and Daniel, we have the prospect of a sequel to the 1790s segment. That does sound like a fresher idea.

The episode is certainly structured very differently than were the first episodes of either the 1790s segment or the 1897 segment. Those featured a relatively wide variety of brightly lit sets full of busy people, getting us off to a fast start in a new world. Today most of the action takes place in the playroom, Ben’s room, and the corridor between them, with a couple of brief glimpses of the drawing room. We keep cutting to Julia standing very still behind one partition or another as she eavesdrops on the dialogue. We are operating within a very small space, but hearing about people who are far outside that space and whom we are confident we will meet soon. So rather than leading with the equivalent of a panorama of our new surroundings, they are opening the space up for us a little bit at a time. That makes it easier to keep the action moving rapidly and clearly, and also leaves us wanting more.

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.