Tag: william h loomis

Episode 1020: The last of the bachelors

Angelique Stokes Collins has risen from the dead, but her renewed existence may end within seconds. She is overwhelmingly cold, and can warm up only by draining the heat from the body of a living person. Someone is coming in the front door, just in time to be her victim and die in her stead. She wonders who it will be.

Almost all the characters currently on Dark Shadows are either so important to an ongoing story that their deaths would end a major arc or have so many connections to everyone else that their deaths would start a new one. So if she kills mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, his fiancée Sabrina Stuart, or barmaid Buffie Harrington, Angelique will be ending the Jekyll and Hyde story, or at least shifting it into a radically new phase. If she kills drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, his wife Maggie Evans Collins, or housekeeper Julia Hoffman, she will be ending the adaptation of Rebecca. If she kills Carolyn Loomis or her husband Will, she will be ending the restaging of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

If Angelique kills woebegone homebody Elizabeth Collins Stoddard or her brother, sardonic dandy Roger Collins, she won’t be ending any ongoing stories. But Liz and Roger are the counterparts of characters who were central to the life of the great house of Collinwood in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows, when it was set in another universe, and are played by actors who have substantial followings. If either of them is murdered, the audience will expect major consequences. Angelique’s son Daniel Collins and Daniel’s cousin Amy Collins aren’t doing much just now, but if Angelique kills a child, especially her own son, the ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices would join the audience in insisting she face a serious reckoning that would take up a lot of screen time. This fit of heat vampirism came on Angelique too suddenly to make sense as the start of a new arc, so we can rule all of those candidates out.

There are also a couple of characters who were introduced to fill in for actors who were away the previous couple of months filming their parts in the theatrical feature House of Dark Shadows. Among those are Angelique’s Aunt Hannah and butler Mr Trask. They are possibilities, but are both played by actors who have enough going for them that it would be a bit surprising to bring them back just to kill them off. There are also a few miscellaneous day players whose characters would have no reason to let themselves into the great house of Collinwood- a bartender we saw in #991, a landlady we saw in #997, etc.

So it would seem that there are only two people who could be Angelique’s next meal. One is sleazy musician Bruno Hess, a former boyfriend of hers who lives in the cottage on the grounds of Collinwood and is friends with Cyrus, but who has been neither seen nor missed for some time. The other is Larry Chase, attorney at law.

Bruno is played by the dynamic Michael Stroka, who twice made a mark when cast in stories set in the other universe. Larry was written into the show as a last-minute substitute for a part played by an actor whose health problems made it impossible for him to continue. They didn’t have time for auditions, so they drafted associate director Ken McEwen for the part. McEwen was in the building, and he had a guild card because of some small parts he’d taken in TV shows he’d worked on in the 1950s. When he has enough time to rehearse, which is to say when he has had more time to rehearse than actors usually got on a show like Dark Shadows, McEwen gets his lines right, except for adding “Well…” at the beginning of every single one. You can tell he is making a sincere effort not to ruin the show. But that’s about all you can say for him. Even at his best he’s stiff and distracted, and when he hasn’t been able to get his part down, he disintegrates completely. So it isn’t much of a surprise that Larry is the one who opens the door. It wasn’t a surprise to me, I should say; writing these posts keeps all the details fresh in my mind. My wife, Mrs Acilius, looked at him for about thirty seconds and asked “Who’s that?”

Larry plays the same scene with Angelique that her second victim, Fred the transient handyman, had played with her in #1003, right down to telling her that he had wanted to hold her since he first saw her. Fred was played by Edmond Hashim, and anyone who sees the two versions of this scene side by side will come away with a new appreciation for Hashim’s talents as an actor. This is McEwen’s final on-screen appearance, though he will pinch hit as the opening narrator in three upcoming episodes. He will continue as an associate director through episode 1179/1180 in December.

Will enters to find Angelique screaming and Larry dead. Angelique, who is impersonating her late identical twin sister Alexis, claims that Larry was just standing there when he had an attack of some kind and dropped dead. Will touches the corpse and says that he is so cold he must have been dead for hours. “Alexis” insists he just died a moment before. Will calls Cyrus, who is the Collins family physician.

Cyrus is in his lab, looking at the potion which turns him into the Mr Hyde-like John Yaeger. He is about to capitulate to his craving when the telephone rings. Will tells him that Larry is dead and asks him to come to Collinwood. Cyrus puts the potion back in his safe and rejoices that he is “Saved!” Larry was Cyrus’ lawyer and apparently a social friend as well. We’ve already seen Cyrus do enough horrible things that this sociopathic reaction is no shock.

Back at Collinwood, Will and “Alexis” are talking with Barnabas Collins. Unknown to “Alexis,” Barnabas is a visitor from the other universe. Her counterpart in his world was the wicked witch who turned him into a vampire, so Barnabas cannot keep a hostile edge out of his voice and manner when he is talking to her. Will is one of Barnabas’ victims, and knows all of his secrets.

When they are alone in the drawing room, “Alexis” questions Will about Barnabas. Will denies knowing him particularly well. Barnabas is staying at Will’s house, and several years ago Will wrote a biography of Barnabas’ counterpart in this universe, a man who lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830. Barnabas claims to be a descendant of that Barnabas Collins, and to have come to Collinwood to meet the author of the biography. Will becomes more and more disturbed as “Alexis” presses him harder and harder for information. She is perplexed that he won’t tell her anything. Lara Parker and John Karlen have both been on the show for a long time, but this is the first substantial two scene between them, and it is terrific. Their acting styles were very different, but they couldn’t have meshed better.

Barnabas is sitting at a table in the Eagle tavern. There is a glass of reddish liquid in front of him. In view of his condition, one wonders what that liquid might be.

Enjoying your AB Negative, Mr Collins? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas invites Buffie to sit with him. Since there are no other customers, she agrees. He tells her he is from South America. The son of this universe’s Barnabas Collins whom he claims as his great-grandfather went to Peru; when he introduced himself to the family, he said that his forebear did not die in that country. But evidently his imaginary descendants stayed on the continent, somewhere.

The Eagle is the counterpart of the Blue Whale in the other continuity. In #3, Burke Devlin was sitting at a table in the Blue Whale with hard-working young fisherman Joe Haskell when he said that his success in life began when a strange man picked him up in a bar in Montevideo. That was the show’s only reference to Uruguay, but Burke, the Blue Whale, and Brazil came to be strongly associated with each other. The song “Aquarela do Brasil,” a big hit in the English speaking world in the 1960s under the title “Brazil,” played on the jukebox at the Blue Whale, and it became Burke’s theme song. Ultimately Burke would die on a business trip to Brazil. Barnabas and Burke were enemies; when he sits at this table and claims to have a South American background, longtime viewers may wonder if he is thinking that the new universe is a place where he can try out a new personality and maybe he will start by imitating Burke’s.

Burke was a dashing action hero, attractive to women. Barnabas’ attempt to imitate him breaks down almost immediately. He winds up mimicking another prominent bachelor from his native universe, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, when he asks Buffie if she’s ever heard of the theory of “Parallel Time.”

Buffie shakes her head no. Barnabas says that some people believe that there are many universes, and that a copy of each of us can be found in each of them. They may look the same, but they lead different lives because they have made different choices. Buffie laughs and says that she hopes her other selves are having more fun than she is. She hastens to say that she doesn’t mean she isn’t having fun at the moment, sharing a table with Barnabas; she means that her life in Collinsport, as viewed from the most all-encompassing perspective and analyzed in the most thorough philosophic manner, well and truly sucks shit. Barnabas says that the other Buffies in the multiverse might have left Collinsport* and had wonderful adventures.

Longtime viewers saw one of those other Buffies in #951, when we were still in the original continuity. She had a different name; she went by Nelle Gunston. And as befits a mirror universe, she moved in the opposite direction. Rather than leaving Collinsport to look for something new as Buffie wishes she had done, Nelle left her parents’ home in Virginia and went to Collinsport because she had joined a cult dedicated to the destruction of the human race and its replacement by a loathsome breed of Elder Gods known as the Leviathan People. Barnabas had been the leader of the Leviathan cult, and when Nelle came to town she sat with him by the same table where Buffie and Barnabas sit today. They even take the same seats.

Buffie is charmed by Barnabas’ talk; between the suavity that Jonathan Frid brings to his part today and the energy with which Elizabeth Eis presents Buffie’s enthusiasm for him, it is far easier than it usually is to believe that Barnabas is a sexy dude. Maybe we are supposed to think that role-playing as Burke has enabled him to loosen up.

The conversation is really warming up when the bell attached to the front door rings. “Customer,” Buffie ruefully says to Barnabas as she rises. It is Cyrus.

Barnabas invites Cyrus to sit with them. He declines, saying that he came only to ask Buffie if she had seen John Yaeger lately. She tenses up. Yaeger used to beat her up and force her to help him with his crimes. She says that Cyrus himself had told Buffie that Yaeger wouldn’t be back in Collinsport. Cyrus says that he did, but that he is worried he might not be able to predict Yaeger’s movements as well as he thought he could. He offers Barnabas a lift back to Collinwood. That’s a bit surprising, since Cyrus got uptight when he saw Barnabas. As Yaeger, Cyrus discovered that there is a coffin in the basement of Will and Carolyn’s house, and he suspects that Barnabas spends his days there. But longtime viewers can remember the days Barnabas and Burke had conversations at the Blue Whale that were just as tense as the one he and Cyrus have in the Eagle, and Burke never failed to observe the small graces. It’s just the done thing, I suppose.

Cyrus leaves, and Buffie remains standing. She and Barnabas keep talking. He gets close, and goes in for a bite. He stops himself at the last second, to her surprise and disappointment. She was apparently ready for a kiss on the neck. He says he has to go. She is even more disappointed by that, but he promises to come back at closing. He asks to walk her home, and she happily agrees.

Will and Cyrus are in the drawing room at Collinwood. Will urges Cyrus to join him in a drink. When Cyrus declines, Will reminisces about the old days at Collinwood, when the party would just be getting started at this hour. In those days, people would leave the great house in the small hours of the morning and continue their revels at the Eagle. Cyrus says he won’t find much company there tonight. When he says that the only people in the place earlier were “the girl who works there” and Barnabas, Will looks alarmed. All of his mannerisms that suggest drunkenness drop away, and he rushes out.

Will gets to the tavern, and finds Buffie alone. The alcoholic author is obviously one of her favorite and most lucrative customers, so even though she has already blown out the candles she tells him he is in time for last call. To her amazement, he is not interested in a drink. He asks her where Barnabas is. She says he’ll be back and that he is taking her home. He says no, and she asks what’s wrong. Before he can answer, Will hears Barnabas’ voice behind him, echoing Buffie’s question. Laboring under the vampire’s power, Will has no choice but to leave Buffie alone with Barnabas.

Nelle, too, had agreed left the tavern with Barnabas. She expected to meet the leader of the Leviathans at his place, and was unhappy to find that the two of them were alone. Buffie is again an inverted mirror image of her counterpart. She takes Barnabas to her place, and is quite happy to be alone with him. The two close in for an embrace. He bites her neck, and she collapses. He had bitten Nelle, too. At that moment, Cyrus enters the room.

Cyrus does not exactly have a counterpart in the other continuity, but Christopher Pennock did play the Leviathan leader whom Nelle expected to meet. Like Cyrus, that character was a murderous shape-shifter. So Cyrus’ unexpected arrival mirrors the Leviathan leader’s unexpected absence.

When we first cut to Buffie’s room, the camera lingers for several seconds on an extremely unusual prop. It is a television set. The only other time we have seen a television set on Dark Shadows was in #27, in the other universe, when Burke visited investigator Stuart Bronson in a hotel room in Bangor, Maine where there was a small portable unit. It looks like it might be the same set.

Bronson’s TV
Buffie’s TV

The shot goes on so long, and the set is such an odd thing to see in the context of the show, that they must be making some kind of point with it. We have wondered why Buffie submitted to Yaeger’s abuse, when she is such a strong and intelligent person. Her reflection in Nelle suggests a partial answer. Nelle was drawn to the Leviathans, who offered to destroy her and all other humans. We can assume that Buffie, too, was following a self-destructive urge when she went along with Yaeger. Associated with her, the television is a symbol of the annihilation of the self. Turn the idiot box on, turn your mind off. If you aren’t careful, you may even wind up spending your weekdays staring glassy-eyed at ABC’s daytime lineup.

*He actually says “Collinwood.” Which is a blooper, but since Buffie mentioned in her first episode that she used to work at Collinwood it is kind of an interesting one. Maybe when another Buffie left her position as an upstairs maid or whatever she was, she got further than the nearest tavern.

Episode 1017: Without hesitation

In April 1967, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis found a chained coffin. Believing the coffin to be loaded with jewels, he broke the chains and opened it. To his horror, Willie found that the coffin contained vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas bit and enslaved Willie, then ventured forth to prey upon the living.

In #230, Barnabas was in the process of taking Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, as his victim. Willie secretly tried to save Maggie. When the rescuers Willie had tipped off appeared, he and Barnabas hid behind a wall and eavesdropped on their conversation. Barnabas realized what Willie had done. Enraged, he beat Willie with his heavy cane. In #232, Willie’s sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, visited Barnabas’ home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Jason saw that the left side of Willie’s face was covered with large bruises. Up to that point, the keynote of Barnabas’ character had been the care he took to conceal his evil nature from the world. It came as a shock to see that he had been so crazed that he left marks on Willie where anyone could see them.

After Maggie escaped from Barnabas, her memory of what he did to her was erased by several magical interventions, and she came to regard him with warm affection. By March 1970, a romance was blossoming between them.

In that same month, Barnabas discovered that an alternate universe could occasionally be glimpsed in a room in the long-disused east wing of the great house at Collinwood. Hoping to be cured of his vampirism, he managed to cross over into that universe in #980. He found that he was still a vampire, and that he was surrounded by strangers, albeit strangers with names and faces that were very familiar to him.

Willie’s counterpart is alcoholic author William H. Loomis. The new universe is a mirror image of the old one, so that while Willie unchained Barnabas’ coffin, Will puts chains on it. Barnabas kept Willie as a prisoner in the Old House and used him as a slave, while Will owns the Old House and keeps Barnabas prisoner, extracting information from him that he plans to use as the basis of a new book. Eventually Will became careless, and Barnabas bit him. Now Will and his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard, are both victims of Barnabas’ bloodlust.

Barnabas has managed to persuade the occupants of the great house that he is their distant cousin whose ancestor left Collinwood for Peru in the nineteenth century. While he was at the great house, he met Maggie’s counterpart. She is the wife of drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, the master of Collinwood. Barnabas eavesdrops on their joyous reunion, which brings his own loneliness into sharp focus.

Maggie’s joyous reunion with Quentin brings misery to the lonesome Barnabas.

Barnabas goes home to the Old House. He eavesdrops while the Loomises argue. Carolyn has shaken free of her dependence on him and wants to warn people that there is a vampire in their midst; Will says Barnabas would kill her before she could ever do such a thing. Barnabas interrupts the conversation. He tells Carolyn that since she is a Collins, he feels a kinship for her that makes him reluctant to harm her in any way. When she asks if he would kill her and Will if they turned against him, he says flatly that he would do so “Without hesitation.” The show is often marketed as the story of a “reluctant vampire” who is determined to protect his family; this exchange shows both the basis for that description in Barnabas’ words and the limits of its accuracy regarding his deeds.

Barnabas goes into the hidden chamber off the front parlor of the Old House where his coffin is currently being kept. Before he turns in for the day, he tells Will to come back at nightfall with a cross and to prevent him leaving the chamber that night. He refuses to explain why.

Will follows the strange command. While he is keeping Barnabas in the hidden chamber, Maggie comes to the house. Will and Barnabas hide behind the wall and eavesdrop on her conversation with Carolyn. Maggie goes on about the fine impression Barnabas has made on the Collinses, and she sounds quite taken with him herself. That leads to another reversal. While in #230 Barnabas and Willie’s eavesdropping led Barnabas to realize what Willie had been up to with Maggie, today Will and Barnabas’ eavesdropping leads Will to realize that Barnabas is afraid he will bite Maggie.

The end result is the same. His craving for Maggie’s blood overwhelms Barnabas. When Will tries to obey his original command to keep him in the chamber, Barnabas uses his mind control powers to weaken Will’s will. Will manages to continue resisting, holding the cross towards Barnabas. It looks like a fair fight, until Carolyn opens the panel and bumps into Will. Barnabas thrashes him with his cane and runs out. Carolyn tends to Will, paying special attention to the badly bruised left side of his face.

Barnabas goes to the great house. He finds Carolyn at the front door. He reminds her of his threats, and recedes into the bushes. When Maggie comes out to see what is happening, Carolyn makes a weak excuse for her late visit. The puzzled Maggie thanks her for her concern, and they part.

We then cut to a bedroom where Maggie is sleeping. A bat squeaks at the window, and Barnabas materializes. He bares his fangs and plunges his head towards her neck.

This is the 26th of 26 episodes of Dark Shadows to survive only as a kinescope after the original videotape master was lost. It’s always a pleasant surprise for me when these crop up, but it’s probably just as well there won’t be any more of them. The “Parallel Time” segment is the first part of the show to make really good use of color, so that the two kinescopes from it, this one and #1006, are the only ones to represent a significant artistic loss. One more videotape master went missing, for #1219, but they had stopped making kinescopes by then, so MPI Home Video whipped something up from an audio track that a fan recorded off the air at the time of the original broadcast. They added narration by Lara Parker and some stills from #1218 and #1220.

This episode marks an epoch in the development of Dark Shadows. For the first time, videotape editors are named in the closing credits. They have done a fair bit of videotape editing in the last few months, but now they formally acknowledge the editors as a permanent part of the show. Dan Rosenson and Robert Steinback, hail to thee!

Episode 1012: Does he look to you like a man under a curse?

Vampire Barnabas Collins has escaped from the continuity in which Dark Shadows took place until late March 1970 and found himself in an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” This universe is largely populated by people who remind Barnabas of their counterparts in his own world, but their personalities and relationships are very different from those he knew. His own counterpart is a case in point. That other Barnabas Collins never became a vampire, but lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830.

Barnabas’ first few weeks in Parallel Time were spent trapped in a coffin. Alcoholic novelist Will Loomis found out about Barnabas after he saw fang marks on the neck of his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard, and decided he could force Barnabas to give him a complete history of his career as a vampire. Will was under the impression this would make a good book. Will’s irresponsibility in keeping a vampire as a pet, his cruelty in exploiting a fellow creature for his own gain, and his lack of literary judgment in imagining that a recounting of the plot of weeks 43 through 196 of Dark Shadows would be both a bestseller and a critical favorite come back to bite him. More precisely, Barnabas comes to bite him when Will lets him out of his coffin and turns his back on him for a moment during their interview, taking the cross out of his sight and freeing Barnabas to attack.

Barnabas forces Will to burn all the pages he has already written. The idea of a book detailing Barnabas’ crimes featured in #326, #510, and #756, and may have planted the seed for the whole conception of Will Loomis.

Will and Carolyn live in the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, which in the original continuity belongs to Barnabas. The pages are still in the fireplace when drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, master of the great house of Collinwood and proprietor of the family businesses, bangs on the door and demands admittance.

Quentin interrogates Will. The name “Barnabas Collins” has been cropping up in the oddest connections lately, and Quentin is convinced Will knows why. Their exchange is getting quite warm when Barnabas enters and introduces himself.

Quentin is bewildered to see Barnabas. Through a time warp that occasionally manifests in the east wing of his house, he has caught a few glimpses of the original continuity, mostly in the form of people standing around talking about how Barnabas is missing and is under a terrible curse. So he is inclined to be leery of this fellow claiming to be a descendant of the Barnabas who died in 1830. Barnabas specifies that his great-grandfather was the son of that Barnabas, the son who went to Peru in the nineteenth century. Quentin had read that that son of Barnabas died while still in Peru. Barnabas says that he did not die in that country. He does not specify where his ancestor went after leaving Peru, but says he spent the rest of his life in poverty. He was so ashamed of this circumstance that neither he nor any member of his family could bear to reconnect with the rich Collinses in Maine. Barnabas claims that he has now made a fortune of his own, leading him to conclude that the time is right for a reunion. Barnabas invites himself to the great house in an hour. Quentin says that the morning would be better, to which Barnabas replies that he will not be free then. Quentin acquiesces.

Quentin exits, and Barnabas orders Will to accompany him to the grave of his counterpart. Longtime viewers will remember #660, when Barnabas managed to travel back in time by going to a grave and yelling at its occupant. Now he hopes to travel sideways in time, returning to his own universe, by the same technique.

Barnabas and Will enter a graveyard we have seen several times in the last seven weeks. It differs from the cemeteries we have seen in the original continuity in that none of the grave markers is in the form of a cross. Most of the graves in the cemetery from which Barnabas emerged were marked with crosses, and he strolled by them with perfect equanimity. The cemetery set was built for Barnabas, so evidently it was not the original plan that the cross would be formidable to him. It wasn’t until #450, 48 weeks after Barnabas debuted, that he was first held at bay with a cross. Even after that, he still strolled placidly through the field of crosses in Eagle Hill Cemetery. Now the apotropaic power of the cross is a major point, and they have designed the cemetery in this universe to accommodate Barnabas’ special needs.

Barnabas calls on his counterpart. He conjures up a spirit, but it is not that of Barnabas Collins (d. 1830.) It is Joshua Collins, father of that Barnabas. The sight prompts Barnabas to gasp “Father!” Joshua denies that Barnabas is any kin to him. Barnabas tries to explain that, while that is true, he is nonetheless Barnabas Collins, son of Joshua, eliciting an angry command “Do not profane those names!” Joshua tells Barnabas to take his vileness back where it came from. Before Barnabas can explain that is what he is trying to do, Joshua vanishes.

Joshua orders Barnabas to go back where he came from. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Joshua appeared to Quentin and Angelique in #1009. That turn was not particularly effective. The visual composition made it too clear that Louis Edmonds was standing in the same space as David Selby and Lara Parker for the actors to create any sense of the uncanny. And Joshua hung around too long and had too many lines for it to make sense that he couldn’t give any useful information. But this time Joshua is off to the side, lit by his own light, and he disappears after just a few seconds. It is a powerful scene, especially for longtime viewers who remember the relationship between Barnabas and Joshua we saw when the show was set in the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968.

Will is terrified. The apparition leaves him trembling and speechless. So far Will has cut an arrogant, self-assured figure. He handled his encounter with the vampire with aplomb. Even after Barnabas bit him, his resistance to the command to burn the pages showed that self-assured personality is still partly functional. But the ghost of Joshua has blasted away the last of it.

Barnabas tells Will that he now has only one way back to his own universe, the way he came. There is a room in the east wing of the great house that is bare and vacant in Barnabas’ universe, but that is fully furnished, richly decorated, and brightly lit here. When Quentin’s wife Angelique Stokes Collins was alive, it was her bedroom. Now Quentin has given it to Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis to occupy while she is his guest. The barrier between the universes is at its thinnest there. Barnabas could occasionally see into Angelique and Alexis’ room from the main continuity, and it was when he was looking through the doors to the room that Quentin has seen that other Collinwood. Barnabas was in the room when it changed, and found himself here. Now he wants to go back to the room, and make the opposite journey.

What neither Barnabas nor Quentin knows is that Angelique has returned from the dead and murdered Alexis. Angelique is now impersonating Alexis. In her life, Angelique had built a little cult of people who expected her to transcend death. The only one she has so far told that she has actually done so is her aunt, Hannah Stokes. Everyone else believes she is Alexis.

Barnabas enters the drawing room of the great house, where Quentin introduces him to “Alexis” and to housekeeper Julia Hoffman, the most devoted member of Angelique’s cult. Hoffman and “Alexis” had been talking about Barnabas before he arrived. Hoffman expressed certainty that Barnabas is a fraud. But after he and Quentin leave to examine the room where the Parallel Time phenomenon can sometimes be seen, she admits that his resemblance to the portrait of Barnabas is too strong to disregard. “Alexis” remembers what Quentin heard while he was watching the people in the room, and asks Hoffman if Barnabas looks like a man under a curse. She does not appear to have expected this question.

Quentin takes Barnabas to the room. Sure enough, the other continuity is visible. Barnabas’ best friend is there, talking to herself about how much she hopes to see him again. She is mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, counterpart of Hoffman. Julia is as devoted to Barnabas as Hoffman is to Angelique. Seeing her, we wonder how long Angelique can keep it a secret from her Julia Hoffman that she has returned.

Episode 1011: In death he dictates

Mad scientist Cyrus Longworth has developed a potion that changes his appearance so drastically that even those closest to him cannot recognize him when he is under its influence. In this disguise, he calls himself “John Yaeger” and indulges his sadistic impulses. He has just committed his first murder, killing a man who had learned his secret. The potion he needs to restore his usual looks is in his lab, but he can’t get there without passing the police. So he has ordered Buffie Harrington, a young woman he has been terrorizing, to fetch it for him. He was waiting for Buffie in a cave on the beach near the estate of Collinwood when he saw the signs of a secret passage, and decided to see where it would lead him.

It has led him to the basement of the Old House on the estate, home of writer Will Loomis and his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard. We have known that this passage was here since #1003, when strange and troubled teen Daniel Collins suggested that his young cousin, Amy Collins, join him in opening it and exploring the basement. Amy refused to go there at night, prompting Daniel to taunt her as a scared-y-cat. We also know, if only because the opening voiceover has been telling us every day for the last five and a half weeks, that vampire Barnabas Collins is chained in a coffin in the basement. Will is holding him captive and forcing him to dictate his autobiography to him.

Barnabas is a visitor from a parallel universe. Longtime viewers are familiar with that universe; Dark Shadows was set there for its first 196 weeks. There is a tunnel between the beach and the basement there as well, and each time it has figured there has been a major development in the story. So when Cyrus, disguised as Yaeger, follows the tunnel and discovers Barnabas’ coffin, we can believe something big is about to happen. He starts to unchain the coffin; if he frees the vampire, that would certainly qualify.

Will and Carolyn are upstairs. She hears the sounds Cyrus is making in the basement and tells Will to go down and check. He takes this as an invitation to another of their drunken quarrels, in which he taunts her for being Barnabas’ victim. Eventually he does go downstairs, where he pistol-whips Cyrus into unconsciousness. He and Carolyn rather improbably manage to carry Cyrus up to the parlor.

When Cyrus comes to, he finds Carolyn aiming the pistol at him. He calls her by name. She does not recognize him, and asks how he knows her. He tells her that he makes it his business to know who all the attractive women are. He asks why Will isn’t there. She doesn’t answer the question. He sees that she is trembling so violently that she can barely keep hold of the pistol; he knocks it out of her hands and runs away. Later, he will meet Buffie in the cave, get the potion from her, and shed his disguise in time to get away with his crimes.

Will rejoins Carolyn in the parlor. He scolds her for letting the intruder escape; she says he was wrong to leave her alone with him. He says he was busy sealing up the panel so that no one else could come into the basement through the tunnel. He says that Barnabas’ coffin must be moved. His idea is to carry it up the stairs and hide it in a secret chamber behind the bookcase in the parlor.

This chamber, too, has its counterpart in the original continuity. We first saw it in December 1966, when crazed handyman Matthew Morgan abducted well-meaning governess Victoria Winters and planned to kill her there. After Barnabas joined the cast of characters in April 1967 and became the master of the Old House, he several times used the chamber as a hiding place. Matthew’s plans for Vicki backfired on him when the ghosts of Collinwood and scared him to death before he could carry out his fell design. None of the occasions when Barnabas used the chamber worked out very well for him. So longtime viewers may suspect that, even if Will and Carolyn can somehow transport Barnabas and his coffin up the stairs and into the hidden chamber, things will not go as they project.

Will and Carolyn let Barnabas out of his coffin. They wear large crosses around their necks, and hold them towards him when he looks at them. They get him up the stairs and into the secret chamber this way.

Once there, Will resumes interrogating Barnabas. Barnabas protests that Will has “enough story” and ought to set him free; Will disagrees. One wonders if Barnabas’ line represents Sam Hall’s feelings as one half of the two-man staff currently charged with writing five scripts a week for Dark Shadows.

Story conference. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Will’s counterpart in the original continuity is Willie Loomis, who was Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall. In #326, Barnabas had framed Willie for some of his own crimes, and the police had obligingly shot him several times. Barnabas was worried that Willie was not dying quickly enough. He railed to his associate, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, that Willie continued to “cling to life with leech-like persistence!” When Julia assured him that Willie would probably die without regaining consciousness, Barnabas said that he might just as easily make a full recovery and set about “writing his memoirs!”

The show picked up on that line after it went back in time to the 1790s. We learned in #510 that Ben Stokes, the much-put-upon indentured servant who was Barnabas’ friend before and after he first became a vampire, did indeed write a memoir, and in #756 we learned that Ben’s memoir included the story of Barnabas’ curse. I wonder if Barnabas’ line to Julia about Willie writing his memoirs was the seed, not only of Ben’s memoirs, but of the whole story of Will Loomis.

Barnabas’ cartoonish villainy in #326 was hilarious, but his objections to Will’s behavior today are quite reasonable. Will would have been doing his civic duty had he staked Barnabas, and indeed Barnabas asked Will to let him die when he first found him in his coffin. Keeping him trapped in the coffin endangers the community irresponsibly, and when Will opens it night after night with Barnabas immobilized by the cross and forces him to produce an oral history he can use use as a source of material he is choosing to be as much of a parasite on Barnabas as Barnabas’ curse has forced him to be on his victims.

Moreover, when Will tells Carolyn today that the book he extracts from Barnabas will be “all true” and that “every critic” will hail it as “a classic,” he seems to be delusional. If it is “all true,” the book will be a novelization of the last 160 weeks of Dark Shadows. The show is fun to watch, but that’s largely because the writers know what kind of material the actors and directors can use to create exciting moments. I can’t imagine anyone looking at it as so much text sitting on the page and calling it “a classic.”

Will turns his back on Barnabas and takes a note. Seeing an opportunity, Barnabas grabs the cord by which the cross hangs from Will’s neck, choking him. Will falls to the floor, and Barnabas bares his fangs.

I haven’t read Anne Rice’s 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire. Ms Rice says she wrote a short story about a reporter taking an oral history from a vampire no later than 1969, the year before this storyline premiered. That story has never been published, but biographers of hers report having seen it and they accept the dating. She also says that she decided to turn it into a novel in 1973, not because she had seen Dark Shadows, but because her daughter had died and she thought it would be a way of exploring her grief. So, any similarities are mere coincidence. I bring it up here, because it represents the definitive refutation of Will’s expectation that “every critic” would hail his retelling of Dark Shadows from the time Barnabas debuted as “a classic.” Ms Rice was free to craft a story that would be right for a novel, unconstrained to copy material produced to keep a soap opera spinning, and most of the reviews she received were quite hostile.

Episode 989: This tacky little drama again

Dark Shadows has taken us to a parallel universe where the A story is a mashup of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca with Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 story “Ligeia,” and the B story is a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Today we also get a good look at the C story, another mashup. The ingredients in this one are Dracula and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Drunken novelist William H. Loomis and his disappointed wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard, take the roles of George and Martha. The parts of Nick, of Honey, and of George and Martha’s imaginary son are combined in vampire Barnabas Collins.

Honey is present at two conversations with George and Martha. She flees from each, moved to vomit by their cruelties, and after the second is never seen again. One session with Will and Carolyn was enough for Barnabas. The circumstances of his exit were rather different from those of Honey’s. Barnabas did not become physically ill when he saw Will and Carolyn quarreling, and is willing to keep skulking in and out of their basement when he is not out preying upon the living. But Will has other ideas. He has chained Barnabas in his coffin in the basement of their house and is planning to force him to tell him his life story, which Will thinks he will be able to use as material for a book that will restore his fortunes. In this he is the mirror image of his counterpart in the main continuity, who broke the chains that held Barnabas in his coffin in his own attempt to get rich quick.

As Martha taunts George for the dead end his career has reached, Carolyn is in the habit of taunting Will with his inability to write new books of his own. As Martha flirts aggressively with Nick in front of George, so Carolyn wants Will to release Barnabas so that he can drink her blood again. As George and Martha’s son turns out to be imaginary, not part of their material reality, so Barnabas is a visitor from the main continuity, not a part of this universe. Inasmuch as Jonathan Frid is away for several weeks making the feature House of Dark Shadows, Barnabas is present only as a topic in Will and Carolyn’s quarrels.

Will pours himself a glass of something, perhaps bergin and water. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

One might wonder if the idea of casting John Karlen as an analogue of George in an adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? occurred to the makers of the show around the time of #706. In that episode, Karlen played inveterate prankster Carl Collins, who held a gun at Barnabas’ head and threatened to shoot him. When he pulled the trigger, a flag labeled FIB! sprang out. George fires a rifle at Martha in Act One of the play, only to produce a similar effect with a Chinese parasol.

Later, Carolyn is eavesdropping outside the drawing room in the great house of Collinwood while Will is flirting with a lovely houseguest, a central character in the Rebecca/ Ligeia mashup. Carolyn stands in the doorway, in Will’s line of sight when he tries to make a date with the woman. Will has already rubbed Carolyn’s face in the intimate nature of her connection to Barnabas, and as his victim she can’t very well recreate Martha and Nick’s threat to cuckold George with any other male. So if we are going to have another scene built around that kind of insult, it will have to be Will who plays it with another woman.

Will makes sure Carolyn can see him at work. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn also spends some time with her friend Sabrina Stuart, who is part of the Jekyll and Hyde story. Sabrina is engaged to Dr Cyrus Longworth, the Jekyll character, and did not recognize him when last night he invaded her home and assaulted her in the persona of John Yaeger, the Mr Hyde character. Cyrus himself is puzzled when he comes to his laboratory in the morning and finds a terrible mess there, along with an IOU from Yaeger. A policeman shows up and asks him some questions, assuring him that he does not match the description of Yaeger. In his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn points out that this scene is recycled beat for beat from Dan Curtis’ 1968 TV movie adaption of Jekyll and Hyde.

Carolyn marches into Cyrus’ lab and tells him Sabrina is missing. She is angry with him for leaving Sabrina alone when the man who attacked her is still at large. He tries to assure her that Sabrina is in no danger, but since he cannot explain why he would believe that he only exasperates her further. She insists they go looking for Sabrina, and he acquiesces. It turns out Sabrina is in the great house of Collinwood, in a trance, trying to reenact the séance at which the Rebecca analogue died.

In the main continuity, Carolyn’s counterpart was married to someone whom she believed to be a man named Jeb. Like Cyrus, he was played by Christopher Pennock. Also like Cyrus, he was a shape-shifter who in his other form committed horrific acts of violence. Carolyn accepted Jeb’s refusal to tell him anything about himself, as Sabrina accepts Cyrus’ refusal to tell her anything that might lead her to suspect the nature of the potion he has developed. It is refreshing to see this Carolyn taking Sabrina’s side and insisting Cyrus do things a reasonable person might do.

Episode 982: Keep the bottle full

In #210, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis found a coffin wrapped in chains in an old mausoleum and jumped to the conclusion that it was full of jewels. He broke the chains and opened the coffin, only to find that it actually contained vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas bit Willie and enslaved him.

Now, Barnabas has traveled to an alternate universe. In this “Parallel Time,” Willie’s counterpart is a writer, the author of several novels and of a biography of Barnabas’ own counterpart, who died a natural death in 1830. This Will Loomis lives in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, which corresponds to Barnabas’ home in his own universe. Will’s wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard, was the first person Barnabas met upon arriving in Parallel Time. Barnabas took Carolyn as his blood thrall, and he has shown her a room in the basement of the Old House that she never knew existed. He stashed a coffin there.

Three of Will’s novels were bestsellers made into feature films, but he and Carolyn are now acutely short of funds. We see why today. Carolyn explains to Barnabas that Will won’t be home until the Eagle closes. Barnabas asks what the Eagle is. He should know- that was the name of the tavern in his Collinsport in the 1790s and again in 1897, and he knew it in both eras. The same place was called the Blue Whale in the 1960s in the main continuity, but evidently it kept its old name here.

Will comes staggering home. He recognizes Barnabas’ profile from a sketch of the subject of the biography he wrote. Carolyn explains that Barnabas is that man’s descendant. When Barnabas says that he read Will’s book and admires it, Will brightens, as authors do, and says that the occasion calls for a drink. At first he insists on putting Barnabas up as a houseguest, free of charge, but Carolyn persuades him to let Barnabas pay rent. It’s anyone’s guess how Barnabas will be paying for anything- he stumbled into “Parallel Time” quite inadvertently, without stuffing his pockets or putting on a money belt or making any other preparations. But Will and Carolyn have an extensive discussion about charging Barnabas rent in this scene, and they bring it up again later. Evidently the writers want us to think about it.

The next day, Will suggests that he and Carolyn go to the great house on the estate to meet the new mistress, the bride of Carolyn’s uncle Quentin. Carolyn pleads a migraine, and Will goes by himself. Housekeeper Julia Hoffman is about to introduce him when he cuts her off. He tells the new Mrs Collins that he knew her father. She is the former Maggie Evans. The past tense about her father Sam is news to returning viewers- yesterday Sam was mentioned in terms that left it unclear whether he was still alive, and we might have hoped to see him. In the main continuity, Sam was killed by a Frankenstein’s monster in June 1968, but that monster would not have existed in this universe.

Will says that he and Sam spent many a night drinking together at the Eagle. The new Mrs Collins is not visibly pleased to be reminded of her father’s drinking habit. She offers Will a cup of tea, and he refuses. He avers that tannic acid is bad for the health. Hoffman is at hand with a glass of brandy, and she chuckles when she agrees with him that she can tell Maggie his views about beverages. Hoffman leaves, and Will urgently whispers to Maggie that he must not trust Hoffman.

Will does not approve of tannic acid. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later, Maggie will go to Angelique’s old room in the east wing of the house and overhear Hoffman telling the portrait of Angelique that hangs there that she has her on the run. Hoffman cackles with glee at Maggie’s discomfort. Maggie opens the door and asks her what’s going on; Hoffman quickly composes herself and says that the staff hasn’t had a chance to tidy up the east wing sufficiently to welcome the new mistress.

Back in the Old House, Will wonders why Carolyn seems so weak. She passes out, and he sees the puncture wounds on her neck. At daybreak, Will waiting for Barnabas by the coffin. He holds him at bay with a large cross and forces him to explain who he is and where he came from. Barnabas tells Will to let him die. Will says he has other plans. He orders Barnabas to open the coffin. There is an even larger cross mounted inside the lid. He says that he will get a book out of Barnabas, and that that book will be his salvation. He makes Barnabas get in the coffin, and chains it shut. To the extent that this universe is a mirror image of the one we have known, we might have expected that Will would believe he could obtain a fortune by putting chains on the coffin, as Willie thought he could obtain one by smashing them off.

The scene between Will and Maggie brings out several of the problems with the current A story, a reworking of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca in which Maggie is the second Mrs de Winter and Hoffman is Mrs Danvers. Maggie Prime has an iconography that goes back to #1, which makes it hard for us to believe that would be overwhelmed by the subtle intimidations that overwhelm Du Maurier’s anxiety-ridden heroine. When we met the Sam of the original continuity in June 1966, he was an alcoholic. Even after the story that was supposed to make Sam’s alcoholism interesting fizzled out and he was retconned as a social drinker, Maggie retained many Adult Child of an Alcoholic traits, such as beginning each utterance with an irrelevant laugh. So Maggie’s reaction to Will’s reminiscence about boozing it up with Parallel Sam goes a long way to confirming that this is the same ol’ Maggie we’ve known all along and leads us to expect her to be as capable as Maggie would be of meeting the challenges before her.

Also, while Kathryn Leigh Scott is a wonderful actress and a great asset to the show, she makes a bad choice in playing Maggie Collins. In the costume drama segment set in 1897, Miss Scott started out as neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond. Rachel was terribly fragile, the survivor of an abusive childhood that left her with paralyzingly low self-esteem. Miss Scott went small as Rachel, taking a subtle approach that required us to watch her closely as we tried to figure out what she was feeling and thinking. But as Maggie Collins, Miss Scott cycles through five or six facial expressions per minute and crafts a distinctive emphasis on multiple syllables per sentence. The directors famously didn’t give the actors much guidance on Dark Shadows– John Karlen said that when he first took on the role of Willie, all Lela Swift told him was “Go!” But either Swift or today’s helmsman, Henry Kaplan, should have taken Miss Scott aside and told her she was overacting and giving Maggie Collins too vivid a personality.

Further, Will is only one of many allies who present themselves to Maggie in her showdown with the memory of Quentin’s first wife, the glamorous Angelique. The second Mrs de Winter feels herself all alone at the estate of Manderley, but Maggie can’t very well feel that way at Collinwood. Not only do people who live there keep making it clear they are on her side, she has a sister to whom she starts writing a letter today, who represents support from and connection with the outside world.

Worst of all, Hoffman is absolutely transparent. In the novel, it is not clear until the very end whether Mrs Danvers is even hostile to the second Mrs de Winter. Du Maurier keeps us guessing for 400 pages whether the whole thing is in the protagonist’s fevered imagination. But the cackling Maggie overhears when Hoffman is having her conversation with the portrait is not even the most flagrant sign she has so far given of her plans.

I outlined these and other objections in a long comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day in January 2021. I still agree with most of what I wrote there, and will be coming back to the topic many times over the next few months.

Episode 972: World beyond the doors

Vampire Barnabas Collins has discovered that he can occasionally see into a parallel universe through a doorway in the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood. He cannot enter that universe or get the attention of its inhabitants, but yesterday a book came flying out of it and landed at his feet. It is titled The Life and Death of Barnabas Collins, and its author is William Hollingshead Loomis.

The Barnabas of the book’s title is our Barnabas’ counterpart in the parallel universe. He never became a vampire, but married his great love Josette, enjoyed prosperity as head of the Collins family, and died a natural death in 1830. It sounds like Parallel Barnabas lived a quiet life of the sort that would make for a dull biography.

Author William Hollingshead Loomis is the counterpart of Willie Loomis, once Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall. Willie is back in Barnabas’ house, not as a slave, but as a volunteer in the battles Barnabas and Julia recently waged against the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who sort of wanted to retake the Earth and annihilate humankind, but who could never figure out a way to get started. The Leviathans have been defeated now, and Willie’s fiancée Roxanne expects him to leave with her. But Barnabas and Julia are still bullying Willie into sticking around while they clean up the messes they have made recently. Most notably, yesterday they made him stake Megan Todd, a victim whom Barnabas inadvertently made into a vampire. Today Willie is still talking about how traumatic it was for him to do that.

Parallel William H. Loomis is identified on the back of his book as the author of three best-selling novels that had been made into motion pictures, Pride of Lions, Gold Hatted Lover, and World Beyond the Doors. When Barnabas shows the book to our Willie, he reacts with panic. When he sees in the prefatory material that Parallel William dedicated the book to “the Clio who inspired” him, Willie declares that he doesn’t know anyone by that name. Barnabas contemptuously tells him that Clio was the Muse of History. Willie has never been represented as an especially literate fellow- when Frankenstein’s monster Adam began using standard grammar and diction in August 1968, Willie’s response was to ask “How come he talk so good?” While one suspects that a writer capable of publishing a book under the title Gold Hatted Lover is not exactly Thomas Hardy, Parallel William is clearly more bookish than is our Willie.

Barnabas tells occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes about the room and takes him there. Stokes is excited by the possibility of examining this direct evidence for the many-worlds hypothesis, but alarmed by Barnabas’ apparent determination to cross over into the parallel universe he has glimpsed. He tells him of the dangers involved, and Barnabas does not want to hear it.

Stokes examines the book. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is on her honeymoon with a man who once hoped people would call him Jabe. Like all his other hopes, that was summarily dashed, and he answers to Jeb. A leftover from the Leviathan arc, Jabe is plagued by an autonomous shadow that manifests itself to him in the manner of the shadow that plagues Anodos, the protagonist of George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes. Every time the shadow appears, Jabe insists on fleeing. Today, Carolyn sees the shadow herself, and finally understands why they haven’t been able to spend a whole night in any of the hotels they’ve checked into.

The shadow is not the most impressive special effect on Dark Shadows. In their post about the episode on their blog Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri said that the little dance the shadow does ought to be underscored with some Herb Alpert-style music, and they post a video to prove their point.