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: April 8

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1969: Episode 732

When Laura uses the power of the Phoenix to torture Quentin, will Barnabas’ new bride-to-be throw a wet blanket on her plans? Angelique: Lara Parker. (Repeat; 30 min.) 

Laura reveals that she has returned from her death in Alexandria, and she seeks revenge on Quentin, who abandoned her to pagan priests and their altar. Angelique agrees to help Quentin if Barnabas will introduce her to his family as his fiance. This thrills Rachel Drummond, as you can imagine. Meanwhile, Quentin learns that Laura’s survival is contingent on a flame in a small pot remaining lit. he’s determined to snuff it.

Quentin dies a lot. Given what he deals with in the average week, I don’t blame him. But it’s not by (his) design. No, on top of everything else, crazy spouses and fire goddesses top off the day by killing him. Fate made the wrong guy into the family vampire, although he fits a little better into the coffin than Quentin. Not that he’s having a good week either, and of course, Angelique is at the heart of it. Only she could combine gifting Quentin with the spark of divine life and ruining date night for Barnabas. The moment when she reveals herself to Rachel as the next Mrs. Barnabas Collins is as deliciously sadistic as the series at its cattiest. The execution hovers right -- right -- on the edge of farce, and were the genre any closer to real life, it would be. The horror expressed by Jonathan Frid (mixed with all-around mortification at the whole thing) is perhaps the most honest moment of acting in the series. I say “perhaps the most,” because the most most goes to Kathryn Leigh Scott in the same scene as she gets the news.

Most Kathryn Leigh Scott characters live to suffer. Somehow, she can pull it all off with a strange strength and integrity. I never get the idea that she’s a victim because, as an actress, she thrives on the promise of action. In her reaction, there is confusion, pain, and then, just as the camera fades out, a hint of knowing umbrage blended with a tad of revenge. For most actors, it would be the first choice, and once you go there, what else is left? By reserving it for just a vanishing quantum of frames, Scott maintains the potential for the character to go anywhere. Lara Parker’s decadent cruelty, Jonathan Frid’s tightly disciplined displays of controlled humiliation, and Kathryn Leigh Scott’s subtly and deliberately controlled emotional gamut make for a master class, and it all takes place between that scene’s last line and the following fadeout.

And that’s why we watch Dark Shadows. One of the reasons, anyway.

Knowing Angelique’s purpose here, which is only understood after 1897 ends, her actions at the beginning are all the more intriguing. And it’s a long, long game. Potentially decades long and layers deep. As the storyline wraps up, we learn that Angelique is there On His Majesty’s Satanic Service under a special agreement that she land a man her using without her powers. Instead, she must rely on good, old-fashioned guilt and blackmail. At this point, her plot may or may not be many men deep, and perhaps repeated. It’s Barnabas, first, just to get rid of Rachel. Then, it’s Quentin, but just to remind Barnabas that Q’s face is on the record album cover, too. Then, she looks all the more selfless when she “works hard” to cure Barnabas of her curse, which, if you’ve seen the entire series, you know that she can do with nary a nose twitch. But she gets to be the martyr here by stretching it out. So, how long does Angelique’s plan go? At least the next seventy years, and then back another 130 or so. If we ignore the hints that 1840 Angelique is in direct continuity following 1795 Angelique. But just ignore that. Imagine.

Very occasionally, Dark Shadows boils itself down to something very simple. And if a Major Plot Event gets in the way of a convenient interpretation, fall back on the defense of “poetic truth.” This isn’t history and it’s not science and sometimes even the writers got confused. But there was a consistency of intent. That’s what shines through and matters as much as anything. The idea of Angelique’s Long Game of Redemption (and staying on Earth, where the hours are better than in Hell, and the English chefs stay in England) ties parts of the room together. And if we imagine that she’s only feigning unfamiliarity with the timeline in 1840, it explains the character and her evolving choices with an eerie sense of strategy. Now that we have the advantage of seeing the entire series before us at once in streaming and on dvd, we can look down on it as would a satellite. Small plot events and occasionally contradictory lines become the tiniest pieces of geography. They become invisible when seen beside sprawling continents and mighty oceans. It’s a stunning view, and Angelique’s machinations in this episode hint at that.

This episode hit the airwaves April 15, 1969.

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.