The Dark Shadows Daybook: March 18

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1970: Episode 985

Maggie thinks she’s seeing double when Angelique’s twin sister arrives… but is she? Maggie Collins: Kathryn Leigh Scott. (Repeat; 30 min.)

Maggie is stunned to find someone she assumes to be Angelique in her home. She is told that it’s Angelique’s sister, Alexis, but no one at Collinwood seems to shake the feeling that the former mistress has returned. Maggie and Quentin row over the new guest, and Maggie leaves.

Best moment of acting on the show, apologies to everyone else. And by the show, I mean all 1225 episodes. Kathryn Leigh Scott and David Selby end the episode with a fiery argument about whether or not Angelique has returned or if it's really just her twin sister, Alexis.

There are moments in acting where everything but the actual moment of total communication completely vanishes. There's no planning. Seemingly no script. The actor is as completely absorbed in the given circumstances and connection with their scene partner as is the most transfixed audience member. You might have heard of the concept of "in the moment." Sounds pretentious? It isn't. It is a moment like this.

Scott is a highly intelligent person. Vastly culturally literate and perceptive about the nuances of human behavior. In her choices, she is also a hell of a chess player. She owns every moment when she is on screen. She is not one for accidents. The final scene in this episode combines that kind of creative ownership with total creative freedom that the rigors of the show’s precision usually deny the performers. It's normally about saying lines and hitting marks with an accuracy demanded by being live on tape with minimal preparation. It doesn't allow for that almost supernatural spontaneity. This moment does. It's not just about raised voices and Selby's bombast. This is about actually BEING.

It's often a mystery... how these moments come about. Olivier wept after certain performances because he had no idea how he achieved them. When Scott departs Collinwood, you hear a voice never before experienced on the series. There is an edge that is totally fresh, totally new, and totally about communicating with Selby at that moment. And she means it.

It goes by in a flash, but it's worth really appreciating.

Overall, Parallel Time is one of the show's least effective storylines because of its failure to live up to the concept. Where do the universes deviate? Where don't they? The writers hide behind, "This isn't science fiction," too much with this. Nowhere is this truer than the moment when Cyrus quotes Shakespeare. Why not attribute it to Marlowe, guys? Have a little fun with the PT concept. It's possible to have those Easter Eggs as flavoring without being a slave to science fiction. It's a general rule that if you play to the dumbest guy in the room, you'll have the dumbest show in town. Given that, if you play to the most average guy in the room, well, you get my point.

This episode focuses on the abstracts of good and evil more dedicatedly than most on the show. Of course, any Jekyll & Hyde story is apt to. I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'm not sure that Yaeger is as much evil as liberated from the yoke of consequences. Why need he be? He's a tourist in Longworth's body. He exhibits too much joy... Longworth, too little. I can see scenarios where he has a great weekend in New York, as long as no one gets in his way.

If there's a monster in the episode, and in all of PT, it's not Angelique. Nor Stokes. Nor Yaeger. Nor any of the ostensible suspects. On a primal level, it's Quentin, that most violent of good guy husbands. The only thing that strains my credulity in the episode is that he doesn't slap Maggie into next week.

Not that he should.

But with a temper that volcanic and self-assured, in an age where That's The Way Things Were, I feel like PT Quentin is cutting short of where he really seems to want to go. He's an unreasoning, privileged, overly confident bully with an anger management problem that is more readily found in kaiju. And THAT, my friends, is a monster. Because that monster is real. The most astonishing OTHER element in the episode is that Maggie actually leaves him.

That is the fantasy element of the series because too few victims of domestic abuse find Maggie's strength. Dark Shadows wasn't an engine of social change. But in this one instance, I can only hope that someone out there was inspired by her example. And what am I saying? Day ain't over yet. Perhaps someone is being inspired right now.

No Quentin is worth it.

This episode hit the airwaves April 3, 1970.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: March 27

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1969: Episode 724

Zombie Quentin kidnaps Rachel Drummond, but a conscientious Szandor tussles with him enough in the graveyard that she escapes. Trapping the muttonchopped automaton in the Old House, Barnabas conducts a voodoo ceremony that should fuse Quentin’s body and spirit. When the body staggers away, our heroes have no idea that it has fallen in the graveyard and can’t get up.

The cork has been opened confidently on 1897, and the wine has just about breathed to perfection. This is the show’s new home, and there’s something about this world that feels like DARK SHADOWS, but even more so. If Roger is stiff, Edward is stiffer. If the streamlined contours of sixties fashions are severe, Victorian clothing makes them look dumpy. And if the sixties are fun, the great-grandparents defined cutting a supernatural rug. 724 is a tight adventure with no real subplot; it’s exactly what can fill an episode and is yet another mondo day in the life-slice for our long-suffering hero. We are still in the general spring break time of the year, and what a thrill for kids. Zombie Quentin Kidnaps Governess! No wonder the record and ViewMaster set were in the offing. If you make a show with these elements, the Geneva Convention requires you to make ViewMaster reels and a spoken word album. This was 1969, the show’s zenith and the time when DARK SHADOWS mania was unmatchable.

If there is a watchword for the overall feel of 1897, it’s “decadence.” The sets and costumes spring to mind, but so do the performances -- broad and freewheeling when not intentionally arch. The possibilities of the story are decadent -- we’re contending with a zombie in this one. Even the horror is decadent, with damsels being buried six inches under (in what appears to be the empty grave of Laura Stockbridge, so says the stone) in graveyards whose smoke wafts into the gypsified Old House, giving it an appropriately seraglio-like atmos.

Even the bloopers have appropriate lushness. Szandor and Magda begin the day by fighting over cold soup like a couple in an Odets play, and Szandor attempts to defend his dignity with said soup trickling from his outrageous mustache. In the words of William Blake, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” and there is wisdom to be had in that mustache. Not only are these actors having the most fun they’d ever have on the show, the characters of Magda and Szandor are the most relatable, reminiscent of an Eastern European West and Fields. How close do you think Szandor and Magda are to Sam Hall and Grayson? This is one of the many, great 1897 episodes written by Sam Hall, and there is a sting of reality to the language -- and a twinkle in his wife, Grayson’s, eye -- that makes me think it’s an ethnicized transcript of whatever was happening the night before. It’s like the Roma touring production of WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, except there’s a dead, reanimated Quentin rather than a dead, imaginary son. Albee damned!

They also provide an entirely different world to which we can compare and reveal Barnabas. He’s an entitled aristocrat at his funniest when forced to fence with words and endure those whom, under other circumstances, he’d just as soon strangle. If he thought that Loomis and Hoffman tried his class privilege, they were the Alan Napier Alfred compared to the Rakosis. As much as Barnabas just… barely… puts up with them in true, sitcom style, he still mixes the exotic with the mundane. We think of him as so bland if we recall his polished innocence when he first appears to Vicki in 1795. Hogwash. He’s a hard-lovin’ scoundrel who was bedhopping ‘twixt the classes in the Islands when not attending voodoo ceremonies, as we learn here. No wonder Angelique loved him.

Did I mention decadence?

On this day in 1969, we sent the Mariner 7 probe to Mars. It found no life.

Officially, anyway.

This episode hit the airwaves April 3, 1969.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: March 17

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1970: Episode 985

Maggie is stunned to find that Angelique’s twin sister, Alexis, has arrived from Italy. As the house falls under her spell, few believe she’s not Angelique returned. Meanwhile, Cyrus Longworth tells Chris Collins about man’s duality. At Collinwood, Quentin is entranced by Alexis’ rendition of “Ode to Angelique,” and as they are about to kiss, Maggie stumbles in and storms out.

Riddle me this: when is a twin not a twin?

Cyrus Longworth quotes Shakespeare in this episode, and it begs the question of questions: just how parallel is Parallel Time? After all, there’s still Shakespeare, and there’s still a recognizable quote from the Cliff’s Notes to HAMLET. What’s really changed? At times, it feels as if the differences are too slight. When the show could have taken a massive risk in format and tone, instead it shifts just enough to ditch certain actors to go film HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS while not confusing the viewers… for instance, by having Harry Johnson attempt to take his mother’s job by assassinating her or Liz running around with a beard being told by Barnabas that, “Every revolution begins with just one spinster.”

But it’s not Mirror Time. It’s Parallel Time. Perhaps the differences should be slight. Protecting the brand is important, and they make hay with characters who largely won’t be in HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS. If they had made this a universe where vampires were the norm and Barnabas joined a human resistance or something, it would have set insane expectations for the movie.

It is a twin of DARK SHADOWS. Not identical. Not too deviant. And like any fictional twin, it gives us a chance to appreciate the counterpart. Most of them are simply more extreme versions of their Main Time equivalents. This episode drives home the importance of twins because it illuminates the fact that this story will focus on the impact of specific twins in a sea of them. With the arrival of Alexis, we have the establishment of one set. With Cyrus Longworth, we have the next, as he strives to give figurative birth to his own twin, John Yaeger -- his other side.

It seems confusing, these twins upon twins. But none of them really are. Alexis is Angelique. Longworth is Yaeger. Smoky is the Bandit. Following that, the larger question is whether or not this parallel universe is a twin or is it simply our own universe with the implications of more extremity (Longworth) or more deception (Alexis)? It’s up to Barnabas to navigate Parallel Time’s maze, and as a man given to outbursts of extremity and a life of deception, this universe may ultimately serve as a very personal mirror.

Today features the last SHADOWS script written by Violet Welles. A press agent for Broadway productions, she was also a ghost writer for Gordon Russell, specializing in characters and the emotional subtext of scripts when assisting him. Vaguely the DC Fontana of DARK SHADOWS, Dan Curtis insisted on hiring her, and she made solid contributions to the show, especially in the 1897 storyline, where she began by helping Evan Hanley and Quentin summon Angelique from Hell. 

Thanks, Violet!

This episode hit the airwaves April 3, 1970.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: April 3

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1968: Episode 467

Barnabas awakens in a hospital to find that Dr. Eric Lang has kinda-sorta cured his vampirism. Meanwhile, Roger finds himself obsessed with the portrait of Angelique, intermittently thinking he is Joshua, and carrying out voodoo spells to kill Dr. Lang.

I stay away from gender issues on the show … unless they hit me in the face like a snow shovel. A woman curses Barnabas over issues regarding another woman. A woman tries to cure him, but screws it up because of yet other women. A man comes along and, yes, cures him. He just does it. No blinking. No errors. Dr. Lang is such a unique figure on the show, it’s a shame to make him a villain. (I think Stokes was brought on to appropriately represent.) In this episode, he’s a forthright, swift, brave man of science, loyal and clear-headed. He’s also quite mad, and his perverse collaboration with Barnabas is another case of what David Skal cites in THE MONSTER SHOW, which is the trouble created by men attempting to reproduce without feminine involvement.

If this is not one of the most innately satisfying episodes of DARK SHADOWS for you, check your fan club membership. Seeing Barnabas savor the daylight felt like something reserved for a final episode. Knowing that such a bold move was taken so early into the show made the sense of possibility on DARK SHADOWS infinitely rich.

In 1942 on this day, episode 915 vampire victim Marsha Mason was born. Also married to Neil Simon, she and he reportedly visited the set on the last days of the show, leading actors to ham it up in the hopes of catching the playwright’s eye. On this day in 1968, the US saw the premiere of PLANET OF THE APES, arguably the first, modern, s/f blockbuster and the world’s longest TWILIGHT ZONE episode.

This episode hit the airwaves April 9, 1968.