The Dark Shadows Daybook: August 27

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1969: Episode 834

When Count Petofi appropriates Charles’ studio for a clandestine rendezvous with Edward, Charles is puzzled to learn that a beautiful portrait of Amanda Harris might ruin the mood. Petofi: Thayer David. (Repeat. 30 min.)

Charles Tate discovers the secret of his own power just as Petofi monopolizes his home to meet Edward and expose his knowledge of Barnabas as the vampire. Barnabas ventures forward, via the I Ching, to interview Quentin’s ghost about how he died.

Nothing defines swagger like Jonathan Frid, Thayer David, Grayson Hall, and Louis Edmonds, and 834’s I Ching wands glisten with a palpable mist of their testosterone. I have no idea how a show like this, with an episode like this, could be called a soap opera. “Supernatural drama” is more like it.  Or maybe just, “Dark Shadows,” because at this point, it defines itself. The swagger begins, though, with Roger Davis. And a bit before. 

The writers swagger, having established Charles Delaware Tate as the most powerful being in the universe. I would say more powerful even than Petofi. If the Count were that powerful, he would have given the abilities to himself. Tate is the perfect man for the job, however, because he is one of the people in the dark shadows universe least likely to want it. If Petofi has to choose a vessel for the power, let it be Tate. Roger Davis responds to the task with his most cerebral performance on the show. Most Davis characters are situational pugilists, dealing with very direct conflicts with high stakes and little time. Tate, however, is a man saddled with the ultimate existential realization of his chosen profession, art. It’s safe to live by manifesting imagination if that manifestation is only two dimensional. But the responsibility that he realizes here is beyond the infinite. Can he change a math equation? Would that make buildings rise or fall? Can he change the shape of a continent? Or eliminate the stars with a splash of black paint? Is he experiencing the ultimate liberation of an artist or the ultimate prohibition? Roger Davis captures this complexity with the deliberate economy of a Go master. No small feat. 

Petofi, of course, is Living Swagger, forging names and appropriating art studios to trap Edward. Edward returns the swag by both embracing and dismissing bohemianism And then staying even after he realizes it’s a trap. It’s the perfect embodiment of mechanized, Victorian thinking and propriety. When his worst enemy, Count Petofi, drops a dime on Barnabas, Edward should suspect that something is up. But Edward thinks like a reptile, with only a few up and down switches that give him very limited modes of very binary thinking. That only enhances his confrontation with the former Fenn-Gibbon, because Petofi is nothing but operational contradictions.



Best of all in this is Barnabas. Because he doesn’t have the power cosmic. He’s not the living embodiment of Victorian ideology. Early in the episode, he realizes that he must figure out how Quentin is going to die and how to stop it. Frid’s own actor’s terror here comes to the rescue, as always. It gives him a marvelously petrified millisecond of indecisive horror. Unlike any other TV hero of the era, he’s not a master detective. Barnabas Collins is largely the master of finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, making him more akin to the heroes of Easy Rider and Little Big Man than Mannix. Nevertheless, he must summon the inner Mannix and solve the problem in the most ludicrous way possible, by projecting his soul temporarily through time to his awaiting body so that he can chat with a lethal ghost who never talked, get him to discuss his own death, and then return to 1897 with the news. It’s ridiculous anti-thinking, tantamount to solving a Rubik’s Cube by switching around the stickers. It smacks of desperation.

It works.

Desperation births a strange willpower, and Barnabas may not be a master detective, but he’s no slouch at risking everything on insane ventures. It’s one of the benefits of being a living corpse who’s suffered every conceivable tragedy. The schemes he executes, especially in this era, work because of sheer chutzpah and the bravery one can only achieve through abject terror. At this point, the audience isn’t tuning in to feel afraid, but rather to see what someone else can do when fear is all they know… and fear for the right reasons.

This episode hit the airwaves Sept. 4, 1969.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: August 20

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1970: Episode 1089

When David discovers the power to raise a crew of undead pirates, what can stop him from using it? David: David Henesy. (Repeat; 30 min.)

Gerard increases his hold on Collinwood by claiming Elizabeth, who sets up the bust on the rail that will fall on Julia in 1995. The children alternately escape from and to Gerard. Having found that there was a real Java Queen, David reenacts a spell to resurrect its crew.

1089 is what late stage DARK SHADOWS is all about. Suspicion. Paranoia. Bowing and scraping to sneering ghosts. And bad fashion. What’s not to love? In this case, the flaw of the show’s final months is also its strength -- pace. This is a rough & tumble, Edwardian, Young Man’s Big Book of Manly Adventure episode, but since the kids are serving pure evil, it also has the subversive delight of being a meditation on “What If the Hardy Boys Went Bad?” In creating it, the writers make the program a carnival spook show ride that seems very slightly broken… in an amusing way. This is complete with pirate lore, now with zombies! Can anyone walk away from that moment? Exactly.

Had this episode been done a year and a half earlier, with Quentin pulling these shenanigans, it would have scared the hell out of the daytime world. But James Storm had a very different quality than David Selby. Gerard’s Ghost was never allowed to charm nor maintain the mask of allusive neutrality. Even his smile was sarcastic. Storm would have made one of the show’s great heroes had they cast him as such, somewhere between Pennock, Selby, and Crothers. However, Gerard is just a tiringly unpleasant spirit… if you compare him to Quentin. If you take him as he is, Gerard is a nasty and cravenly spirit on an unambiguous mission to torture the residents of Collinwood and level their home. Quentin’s haunting created questions that demanded an answer. Gerard’s had far less mystery and far more evil. We were destined to love Quentin. The only thing we are destined to do with Gerard is await his death scene. And I say that as a fan.

Gerard seems to have a very odd take on being a ghost, and even worse luck. His highlight in 1089 might be his attempt to lunge at people who just slowly saunter out of his way. His arms remain outstretched in empty air, and we wonder if he has the power to chase them or rematerialize in their new path. Clearly not, so he just sneers some more. It’s an oddly humanizing moment for the specter, if unintended by the authors. There is a winningly lunkheaded quality to all of the proceedings. For instance, Gerard’s main punishment appears sartorial in nature. Each possessed person seems to be trying to outdo the others for Worst Outfit. Liz is in a hot pink, silk, overinflated whirlwind of cotton candy, bearing a cape. Hallie seems to be in a shifting paisley chameleon uniform that changes patterns and hue depending on which eyesore of a curtain she’s standing near. But David takes the nuclear-azure urinal cake in an astounding, blue, belted, scoop-neck sweater/vest that could not have been made nor meant for a man under any circumstances. Since when is Gerard raiding Eve Plumb’s wardrobe? That makes the best dressed person in the episode… Julia Hoffman. Not just Julia Hoffman, but Julia Hoffman in a plain, brown dress. It empowers her to warn Liz not to put the Greek bust on the narrow handrail by the stairs. (You’d have to be possessed to do it!) It’ll bean her on the head in The Future. But Liz is too hypnotized to do anything but scoff, and so it stays on the mantle, somehow keeping its precarious place as zombies pull the roof around it down from within. If I were Julia, that’s a sticky-tack secret I’d crave.

David rounds out the episode by wondering if Gerard will punish them further, so he waves the green flag to summon zombies who will destroy Collinwood. How would Gerard have punished the family if David hadn’t? Maybe by making them dress off-the-rack from Orbach’s. 

This episode was broadcast Aug. 27, 1970.