The Dark Shadows Daybook: April 1

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1969: Episode 727

When Trask takes advantage of the Collinses generosity, will Barnabas take advantage of his Charity? Charity Trask: Nancy Barrett. (Repeat. 30 min.)

Quentin, revived, is distressed to find no one in the tower room. He and Barnabas dislike Trask, who’s now staying at Collinwood, but Quentin mistrusts his cousin from England more. Later, Trask’s daughter arrives and knows Rachel. The latter later reveals to Barnabas that she was once forced to work for Trask, who abused her when she was younger. Barnabas retaliates by biting the younger Trask.

There’s a great moment in this episode early on. Trask is in the drawing room, praying to, literally, the high heavens, full-force, and Barnabas walks into the foyer from outside. He hears the religious ecstasy roiling within the drawing room. He knows who it is. And he knows what all of that implies. At no point has anyone in history said, “Oh, good, a Trask is here; our troubles are over.”

You know as if his mission weren’t difficult enough. It was just a year or so ago, kind of, that he was having to wall a Trask up. That should have fixed it. How could an ostensibly celibate guy have such a legacy, and seemingly do so from behind a wall of bricks? Yes, he could have had his kids beforehand, but it’s not as interesting to contemplate.

I don’t know what it is  about a really forcefully uttered prayer by a guy in a long black coat and muttonchops, but it is a portent of doom like few others. Jonathan Frid captures the only rational response. It’s not so broad as to ruin the day of theology enthusiasts, but it definitely lets us know that he’s not hearing a blissfully gentle cover of “Moon River,” either. And Barnabas’ expression subtly conveys the rarest quintessence of an understated, “Oh, shit,” that simply commands that I use the word, for none other suffices. Of course, like any irresponsible critic, I read into these things what I want to, and in this case, as he’s processing bellicose and Biblical booming from beyond the door, I wonder if Barnabas is asking himself, “Should I hang up my coat, stroll in, and engage in thoughtful banter, redolent of implicated knowledge and planned counter-strikes, or should I simply hoist my cane aloft and beat the bullying bastard into 1898 before he can screw up the storyline any more?”

Banter wins.

Later, Quentin enters, strangely compliant to Trask until he’s alone with Barnabas. In that scene, we see Quentin’s strength and the weakness Barnabas must overcome. For a moment, we see them collaborate against a common enemy. Quentin, however, assuming everyone is as opportunistic as he is, turns his suspicions with wearying inevitability toward Barnabas, cuing our hero to again show the patience of one of the saints embarrassed by Trask’s allegiance. It’s frustrating, but it illustrates the size of the challenge confronting Barnabas and again outlines the overall arc of Quentin’s story, indicating that it’s only the beginning. In structure and complexity, it is an arc that may very well be the show’s greatest, narrative triumph, necessitating nine or so months to tell.

Mechanically, Barnabas and Quentin have very different story arcs, not only in particulars, but in the gears of the storytelling, itself. Clearly, Barnabas has the longer story in number of episodes. But he also has a longer arc in terms of sweep and span of life. Barnabas’ story is not about what his origin does to transform him, it’s about what it leads him to do with his life. Quentin’s story is shorter, especially in that everything interesting possible is knit up in his origin and immediate aftermath. No wonder Quentin seemed wasted after 1897; what else could they do with him? His story is about going from boyhood to manhood. Barnabas’ story is about going from being a man to, ironically, a god. A master of time, space, and the very plasma of life. He would sometimes reject his godhood. Sometimes embrace it. Quentin can never use his condition to any advantage. Barnabas’ true curse was that he could. 

Beyond that, the episode putters along perfunctorily. It’s another episode in Trask Recruits, this time letting us know that Rachel was his prisoner and that his daughter loves the power to say ‘no,’ as much as he does. Well, Barnabas has other plans.

Unable to crush him immediately, and suspended by Rachel’s fright, Barnabas lets it go. Well, other eras of Barnabas would let it go. But the 1897 Barnabas is Silver Age to the point that I’m amazed Willie Loomis didn’t become a talking dog sidekick. Which would have been great. Like, you know a spaniel? I digress. THIS Barnabas might not punch Trask’s lights out, but he can at least bite his daughter and hold her in his sway as spy and saboteur. Besides, biting and controlling Nancy Barret is a legitimate part of the cyclical story that the show is developing.

The only dependable Trask I know. Hallelujah!

This episode hit the airwaves on April 8, 1969.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: March 23

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1971: Episode 1244

Series Finale. Part One: When Catherine is tricked into joining Bramwell in the haunted room, what will stop Morgan Collins? Catherine Collins: Lara Parker. (Repeat; 30 min.)

Catherine finds herself in the secret room, where Bramwell prevents her suicide by sharing the willpower to defy the possessing ghost of Brutus. When Morgan realizes they may still live, he loads his flintlock, determined to see that they don’t.

The second-to-last Dark Shadows episode. In some ways, it's a more powerful notion than the last. Because with this, there is still an opportunity for something else. One more twist, turn, revelation, development, etc. Viewers knew where it fell in the broadcast order. Watching it was not a process of seeing things for the last time, desperately scribbling mental notes in the diary we keep with us always, Cecily.

There is a rare privilege in second-to-last that way, and it courses through the episode. It has risk and bravado. It is not a resolution of declining actions. It is not the echo of Gordon Russell's typewriter gone cold. It is a 24 minute-long bang of an exclamation point hammering onto a page at 500 frames a second. Nothing is over until Sam Frickin' "God" Hall says it's over, and there is still a future to this.

From a maybe-spooky house filled with the failure of love to a violently haunted room endured by the truth of it, Dark Shadows tears down the freeway of storytelling, inverting Art Wallace's vision, and by exploring its antithesis, fulfills it. No more questions. No more things to not understand, Vicki. Morgan Collins is the ugliness of Liz's homicidal rage and Roger's sociopathic indifference stripped of the necessary glamor of having to star in tomorrow's episode. Ultimately, Liz and Roger are not forgivable. We've only been bullied into forgiving them by winning performances and unlikely changes of heart. Morgan Collins, as we learn, was not driven mad by Brutus nor given any other excused absence from morality. He's a terrible human, and as Dark Shadows slips from the airwaves, it's not going to vanish while giving a moral sanction to that cretin.

Let me qualify this, and follow me to the end of the paragraph. I don't give two hoots about women's issues. Absolutely none. I have plenty of issues of my own before I even contemplate another gender… if gender even exists and I get a headache this big contemplating it. But I am still a human, and I don’t like to see people ruin their lives for unchallenged reasons. So believe me when I say that even I am on fire in the best sense over the intoxicating politics in this episode. Much of the strength of this episode is as a reinforcement for female audience members, trapped at home at four o’-something in the afternoon, to say, "Absolutely not.”

It’s about damned time.

It’s practically drawing a map to escape the socially acceptable Morgans who have trapped them into powerless lives of reproductive obligation and ham cookin’. To me, Bramwell and Catherine are equally powerful allies in fighting the Room 1408 of Collinwood. The whole maghilla set into motion by Brutus' entitled ownership of Amanda is picked up by Morgan and then undone by Catherine and Bramwell. It may take the fear and pressure of a haunted room for them to insist on the other living, but they do so.

Breaking it down -- Bramwell, holding the fuzzy end of the economic lollipop, is not the apparently attractive suitor. But he's the right one. Catherine, subject to the pressures of the age, makes a sadly understandable choice, but she reverses it passionately. And Bramwell is there for her.

It has to be Jonathan Frid and Lara Parker. The argument about whether or not the series is about them is ended with this episode. Don’t look at the jury. They’re at the Blue Whale, job well done. Upon whom does the end of the DS saga rely? Yeah, the most important characters at the end, making the pivotal choices... and the character names don’t really matter.

The end of the Barnabas/Angelique story wasn't in 1840. It's here. Yes, okay, it kind of ended in 1840, but this is the test, in a spiritual sense. Follow me. Invert everything to see if you get the same results. Make Bramwell the poor one. Make Catherine the one who follows propriety. It's even Bramwell's fellow Collins who is the villain. But unlike Jeremiah, a victim of a love spell, Morgan is an agent of action, conducting himself with a perverse sense of deliberate clarity. By reversing the roles, we see if the lessons leading up to the 1840 resolution will stick in the most metaphysical sense.

They do.

That's why 1841PT is the proper end to the series. That's how it fits in. If the strength of love is strong enough, it will hold true. No matter the social expectations. No matter the century. No matter how parallel the band of time. No matter the names of the characters.

Never said it was easy.

Liz lacked it. Roger lacked it. Barnabas and Angelique earned it. Bramwell and Catherine made sure it was here to stay.

Gordon Russell ends his final script with proper disrespect for traditional expectations of marriage and social class. Not just for female audience members, but for the kids still watching, as well. Uncles Sam and Gordon could only provide a safe place for a half-hour a day. For many, there was a far more twisted vision of home unspooling the other twenty-three-point-five. Not for all of them, no. But the message was there for the right ones. And the rest got a damned good story.

And that's an issue even I can get behind.

This episode hit the airwaves on April 1, 1971.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: April 1

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1969: Episode 727

When a scheming clergyman demands that Collinwood praise the Lord, will Quentin pass the ammunition? Gregory Trask: Jerry Lacy. (Repeat. 30 min.)

Barnabas and Quentin spar over the location of an escaped Jamison. Trask arrives and threatens a terrified Rachel Drummond, who liberated herself from his abusive school after being punished for a teenaged tryst. Barnabas attacks Trask’s daughter at the end of episode.

Doubles! Twins! Reflections! And a terrible school.

The story of Worthington Hall revealed in this episode is a story of stunning cruelty, and the audience experience of enduring its master, Gregory Trask, until the very end of the 1897 storyline is excruciating. But it is a pain shared by Barnabas and Quentin. By all rights, either had the moral sanction to drag him to the Old House and have Magda turn him into goulash. But they don’t. Why?

Quentin is already in transformation when he returns to Collinwood for this story; he just doesn’t entirely know it. The guilt of abandoning Jenny may not have him wringing his hands, but his desire to keep her isolated from his life is not the attitude of a devil-may-care cad. A true cad would disavow that there was anything to hide. Quentin at least has the conscience to want to deceive. So, regarding Trask, he’s playing by more rules than he might have once disobeyed. Even if he’s just trying to stay in Judith’s good graces, that’s at least an acknowledgement of consequences. Additionally, the man was just a zombie and spends time in this episode pondering why and how. Quentin’s most monstrous moments are when he has no mind at all and must hear reports of what he did while his conscious mind was out. It will be the same thing as when he is the werewolf, and this is a foreshadowing of that. If Barnabas’ secret is one of urges kept under wraps, Quentin’s is deeper and more existential. When Barnabas seizes upon his capacity for evil, it’s because he is choosing not to be good. Quentin, however, is slowly learning to choose goodness, but has something so “cursed” within him that a monstrousness manifests itself whether he tries to make a choice or not. The lesson of Barnabas is that some have free will that is excruciating to exercise. The message of Quentin is far more 20th century. Free will is irrelevant. We ARE the monsters. Our crimes are done unconsciously. In both cases, he’s revealed as such by a curse. Because I think “revealed” is more appropriate than “transformed.” Quentin, by abandoning his family, dies to them. But he comes back. His damage, however, continues, despite his rebirth. The second curse simply makes him aware of what he is... and what he does… just by being himself. It’s not really a curse, then. It’s a window. His struggle after the painting is finished resides in being an evil man who must choose not to be. The painting becomes his gift to see himself whenever he wishes. It’s a constant reminder.

Barnabas is a good man finally mastering the choice to invoke evil. (And not choking Trask on the spot, here, is a tough choice for him to make.) He is Quentin’s mirror in this sense, and in this episode, both men address the same mysteries with information the other lacks. Being two sides of the same metaphorical man, they naturally mistrust each other. Only through tragedy and courage will they learn to trust and confide in one another. If 1897 is about anything, it’s about virtue and vice learning to acknowledge that each has an invaluable element of the other within it. Vice gets things done, and can do so with a sense of judiciousness. Virtue does more when it can can admit that its representatives need the liberties of vice to fight the villainous. 

Trask exists as a counter to both. His grandfather had good intentions wrapped in a toxicity he couldn’t see. Gregory is a toxic man who is wrapped in the cloak of good intent, knows it’s only a cloak, and doesn’t seem to care who else sees it. Because they’re not going to take the risks associated with calling him on it. If the Emperor with the new “clothes” were an intentional exhibitionist, he’d be Gregory Trask. Both Quentin and Trask learn that they are fundamentally evil people. But Trask likes it. He’s Quentin’s dark future, where the Cad of Collinwood has gamed the system to a point above reproach. He even resembles a dystopic Quentin from Earth 3. Sideburns. Long coats. A charisma. And a hypnotic sense of lust. Quentin eyes the ladies, but Trask practically carries them away to a mental seraglio. As he leers at his own daughter and savors his power to punish Rachel for smooching with someone other than him, we begin to give Quentin a break. Quentin is simply a chauvinist. Trask is a misogynist. The difference is demonstrated by watching the two men in contrast.

And here’s Barnabas, navigating between the two and realizing he might not be so bad, either. He’s in his social milieu and has enough of the hang of the vampire thing that he doesn’t have to use it. I’m sure he wanted to when Trask asked him to leave the drawing room. But that would have called attention to himself and this is a long game. Instead, he plants a spy with Charity and gets on with the larger work. His first mission is to free himself from the irony engine that is 1897. Yes, Trask and Quentin are two ends of a perverse spectrum. Just as Barnabas and Quentin are dark reflections, Quentin -- especially as a ghost -- and Trask are dark siblings. Both invaded Collinwood when least expected, attracted by the promise of power, and both have designs on the estate’s heirs, David and Jamison. The coincidence could not have escaped Barnabas’ attention. He’s been fighting to free the present from the past. Quentin and Trask plot to direct the future from the seat of the present. All Barnabas has to do is stop them.

This episode was broadcast April 8, 1969. 

The Dark Shadows Daybook: April 1

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1968: Episode 465

Barnabas fears that Vicki will reveal him, and orders her to elope with him and flee Collinwood. Before she leaves, Vicki has a dream where she is in 1795, unable to convince Nathan Forbes to recant and unable to prove that she, not Peter, killed Noah Gifford. After seeing Peter die in the gallows, she awakens. When Barnabas comes to collect her, she insists on proving that the mausoleum has a secret room. She hid there in the 1790’s, and if there really is one, it will demonstrate that she actually traveled through time. On the drive with Barnabas, Vicki crashes to avoid a man who stepped into the road. The man is the modern day doppelganger for Peter Bradford.

DARK SHADOWS at its darkest and most riveting doesn’t necessarily mean kidnappings and curses. 465 centers on guilt, self-doubt, paranoia, and compulsions. Barnabas is doing something he desperately wants -- taking Vicki to marry him -- and he’s doing it for the worst reason: to silence someone who knows just enough of the truth to either ruin him or force him to kill her. Vicki’s knowledge is sufficient to drive her to find and prove the truth, but stops at WHY the truth unfolded as it did. When she’s driving Barnabas to the mausoleum, talking about the kindness of Ben Stokes and the pride she takes in his later happiness, Barnabas seems to be straining to agree and reminisce. She’s experienced so much of the fantastic, what does one more element matter? You know, “By the way, I was the vampire back then, but it’s not like you think. We both got the royal screw from Angelique and lost people we actually loved in the process. Let’s have a good cry, okay?”

Seeing Vicki this focused and this disinterested in the approval of others is a startling glimpse into the character she might have been, and it’s a shame that she enters her final act on the show with a strength we’ve been longing for in our protagonist. Like so many people trapped in small worlds, just when she gains the moxie to be interesting, it’s clear that she’s only going to use it to go away. Swell. We get to hear her not understand things for two years. Now that she does, Vicki becomes a short timer.

But she has to run over Peter Bradford, first. It’s a morbidly fatalistic ending for an episode dominated by a nightmare more disturbing than anything the dream curse could throw at us. A lover she can never save hangs as a result, his legs kicking impotently in the air until they stop. Nathan Forbes turning his back on his own conscience to gloat at her that, “Death is the best of all possible worlds!”

This is metaphysical helplessness, chased by an undefeatable monster of our own creation… and created for a damned good reason. Of course, it’s a reason we can’t prove and a creation that cannot be undone. This is deep and deeply troubling writing that takes two years of brewing to turn into the deep water dream Vicki inflicts on herself.

The slash-and-burn destruction of Barnabas and then herself is the only possible response to uncovering the untruths that tortured her sleep. The only thing that could reverse something like that is an impossible love appearing centuries out of place to wave you down with new hope. Which is precisely what happens in the worst and happiest ending of any episode in all 1225.

This episode hit the airwaves April 5, 1968.